


With All One's Might

by iz_the_original



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood and Violence, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Conspiracy, Dysfunctional Family, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Romance, Everyone Needs A Hug, Explicit Language, F/F, Family, Found Family, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Hydra (Marvel), M/M, Major Original Character(s), Mystery, POV Multiple, Slow Build, Team Dynamics, Unreliable Narrator, Yearning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:07:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 32
Words: 79,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27038434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iz_the_original/pseuds/iz_the_original
Summary: Eighteen-year-old Emmett Faust wakes up from cryofreeze to find himself in the basement of a mysterious corporate entity. He soon learns that the company, Mercury (believed to be one of the last surviving arms of Hydra), has experimented on him with terrifying results, transforming his body and maybe even his mind. Alone and on the run, he has no choice but to trust Steve Rogers if he wants to escape Mercury and maybe (finally) find a life worth living.Steve Rogers doesn't know what he wants when he stumbles upon the scared kid hiding out in a snowy car impound lot. What used to seem so simple now seems so complex - his feelings for Bucky, his place in the Avengers, his role as Captain America. Even the clear moral defeat of Hydra has proven less decisive than it first seemed. Emmett is a way forward, a way for Steve to again figure out what it means to be good and to do right. He finds out quickly, however, that this wayward teenager isn't the clear-cut victim he first appears to be.Meanwhile, another of Mercury's assets has been sent to hunt Emmett down, pitching Emmett, Steve, and everyone he loves headlong into a dysfunctional, deadly conspiracy.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Sam Wilson, James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov & Sam Wilson, James "Bucky" Barnes & Wanda Maximoff, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Sharon Carter/Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson, Steve Rogers & Sharon Carter & Natasha Romanov, Wanda Maximoff & Bruce Banner
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Story takes place after Captain America: Civil War and acts as if the events of Infinity War/Endgame just...didn't happen. At this point, Tony and Steve are in the process of reconciling and trying to reform the Avengers in the wake of the whole Bucky-killed-my-parents vs. I-know-that-sucks-but-I-love-him thing/I-like-the-idea-of-government-oversight vs. I-think-that-idea-sucks-and-you're-wrong thing. Suffice to say, it isn't going swell. So that's operating as the background of everything going on. 
> 
> I plan on updating every week until I finish. If there's a shift in the upload schedule, I'll let you know in the notes for the chapter the week before. Also relevant: the plotting for this is a bit complicated because as noted in the tags there's a big ol' conspiracy/mystery and in order for that type of thing to be effective it needs to be planned out beforehand. This means that I've got most of this written out so I can iron out whatever wrinkles prior to posting. Read: I've got most of this finished at this point in time (writing this 12/22/20) so if I manage to leave it undone on here that'll be the miracle. Also read: This means my upload schedule will be very, very consistent because at the point I'm uploading all I've got to do is a quick scan edit and that week's chapter is ready to go!
> 
> Hopefully that'll ease someone's mind. Anyway.
> 
> Included in this fic: Winter Soldier-esque hijinks, Steve being the no-nonsense dad we always knew he could be, general distrust of governments and systems, and a ton of angst - queer and miscellaneous. 
> 
> Also good to note: If I have even the slightest suspicion that something in a chapter will be triggering, I'll note that in the notes for the chapter. As a heads up: this means things like brief misgendering, allusions to homophobia, that sort of thing, nothing that can be referenced by the Archive Warnings. So if that's something you're concerned about, be sure to check out the beginning notes of each chapter for that. And if you think I missed something that 'should' be referenced as a tw, absolutely let me know and I'll fix it ASAP.
> 
> FYI - Canon characters won't show up until the second/third upload. Idk if that's unusual, just thought I'd throw that out there. Also, this guy's a bit of a slow burn, but the pay-off is there, I promise.

The file says he has been asleep for thirty years. The file has a picture, too, of his sleeping face beneath that little round porthole of glass. Frost in his eyebrows. Lips chilled and blue. Collarbone bare and gray, easy to see the suggestion of muscle and bone beneath the thin white t-shirt. I hold the file up, looking between the five by three photo and the real thing.

In both, he doesn’t seem quite real. I thought it when I first saw the picture, and now that I’ve pulled out the containment unit where Mercury keeps him, the impression reinforces itself. I recall all the stories I’ve heard, all the reports I’ve read. I remember thinking to myself as I sat in that cramped basement cubicle, No way. No way does someone go from a child to this. It just isn’t plausible. It doesn’t make sense.

The truth doesn’t fit into the forms, no matter how it is finagled and coaxed, no matter the cleverness or neatness of the verbiage. The picture is the closest any of that intelligence got to communicating the bizarre truth of the kid before me, zonked into cryofreeze, unfeeling and bliss-less. 

My knuckles whiten where I clutch at the file, a sudden flare of disgust boiling in my gut. Maybe Mercury got it right. Maybe it’s better to leave Emmet Faust in a glorified human filing cabinet, a purgatorial morgue. He’s slept here for thirty years. He can sleep here for thirty more, and maybe he’d be better off for it. Maybe we’d all be better off for it.

But it isn’t my job to take a peek at Emmet Faust and let him be. If my guessing and conjectures are right, he’s been an unwilling martyr before. He can do it again. As much as the truth of the matter turns my stomach, it doesn’t change what has to be done. 

I take one last, long look at the stillness in his cold face. 

For nearly thirty years, the hacked logs I’ve accessed have remained nearly identical. Same day of the month. Same time. A lab tech enters a code and pulls out his drawer, and a resident doctor checks his vitals while the tech fusses over the intricacies of the machine that keeps Emmet alive. Once they’re satisfied that nothing has changed, they initial their respective reports and go on their way until the next month. Later that day or that week, depending on bureaucratic motivation, an overworked desk jockey scans the reports, logs them, and then files away the paper copies, all of it safe and lackluster and monotonous until I came along and picked their network’s pocket.

“I’d say sorry,” I tell Emmet Faust. “But I think you’d know that’s not true.”

The cold of the cryochamber has numbed my fingers, and I have to shake my hand out before I tap the code into the keypad inset into a tablet-sized box attached to Emmet’s unit. This is all cold-war tech, clunky and outdated but freakishly ambitious at the same time. According to all laws of common sense, it shouldn’t work. But it does. The interface beeps at me in response to the code, a tiny light pulsing red on the side of the box, its primitive computer brain sure I’ve made a mistake.

I type a second code, holding the file closer to my face so I can make out the numbers. Again, the computer asks, Are you sure? I type in the third code. Yes, I’m sure. This far into Mercury, I’ve already bypassed the issue of identity and authority and name badges. The details aren’t so important as the fact that I’ve made it, I’m here, because that’s all that matters to the computer.

One last time, one last code. Emmet Faust doesn’t look peaceful under that cold-clouded glass, but he does look undisturbed. The containment unit hisses and clanks as it starts to power down, launching into the slow, laborious process that will end with Emmet Faust coming to life and opening his eyes. I’ll be gone long before this happens, my task complete. Other people will deal with the headache of corralling and containment and PR. I plan on taking a vacation, throwing my phone into the ocean, maybe doing a bit of freelance work from a sandy white beach, and thus become suddenly and alluringly hard to find.

I don’t believe in things like fate or second-chances or resurrections. Still, this moment has its own kind of poetry. Unable to resist the pull of the whole thing, I lean in close, until my warm breath fogs the glass, knocking a knuckle against the side of the containment unit. The resulting clang echoes dully through the small storage room.

“Hey, sleeping beauty,” I say, clear and loud. “Wake up.”

Emmet Faust doesn’t stir, but I have a feeling he hears me. A chill deeper than cryofreeze-cold presses against the back of my neck. I also don’t have much faith in omens or forewarnings, but all of this has been different since the moment I learned about it six years ago. Suddenly perturbed, I leave quickly, without looking back, abandoning my file on the guard’s desk as I pass. Being dead, he doesn’t notice or care. This whole place will be on fire soon, anyway. The details of how this will happen aren't important, either. A smuggled grenade, a Bic lighter, a bottle that looks and smells like it contains perfume. A respectable women’s briefcase. A coy smile and a system shutdown and a pressed pantsuit. As long as it ends with a pulled pin and a pitch perfected in college softball days, it doesn’t matter.  
Emmet Faust will get out alive. For him, there isn’t an easy way out of this.

I can move on. Emmet cannot. I’m aware of the luxury, and maybe a tiny part of me feels guilty, but the larger part feels glad and relieved to leave this whole mess behind.


	2. It's All Bad and Getting Worse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emmett finds himself in the clutches of Mercury and must make his escape, but not before he discovers an impossible truth

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]

As a child, my grandma would turn on the little box tv to the National Geographic channel. I think I was six when I watched the documentary on the Antarctic. I remember sitting on the threadbare blue carpet, the floral throw pillow clutched to my chest. It was like the tv transported me. The ice in Antarctica went on forever. Green and purple light floated in the sky. It was impossibly cold. A voice explained that in the winter months, it was always dark, and the sun never came.

For whatever reason, this soothed me. Watching that documentary gave me a strange feeling I didn’t know how to express when I was a kid. I think it was that when I watched it, I wasn’t there anymore, in the familiar shoebox confines of that double-wide trailer, my skinny knees poking through the holes I’d worn in my faded secondhand jeans, lonely and all by myself. It was like I stepped out onto the ice, which disappeared into the dark in every direction, and I understood how insignificant and small humans really were, not just me, but everyone. 

When I got older, I would lay awake and think about a night like that, a night that never ended. Flat on my back, hands folded over my chest, I stared up at the ceiling and thought about the cold and the dark and the unrelenting ice. I imagined getting up from the living room floor, stepping through that tv screen, and walking into that cold darkness until I disappeared.

I met a Mormon kid once before those sleepless nights who tried to tell me about God and heaven. He was a skinny kid, his hair combed flat to his head, his white shirt neatly buttoned and tucked, his collar starched. He leaned up next to his bike against the side of a bodega, sipping an orange Faygo, eyes lidded, watching people walk by pretending he wasn’t there. When I offered him a cigarette, he took one, and he lit mine, too. Then he started talking and talking, and he really meant what he was saying. That’s what got me. He really believed it. I felt so sorry for him I didn’t steal his bike like I originally planned to do.

To his credit, he really got me thinking, and I decided that if a God or a God-like force really existed, he or she or it wouldn’t bother with places like heaven or hell. If they really knew what they were doing, God would make death a place like Antarctica. When you died, your soul could just walk out into it for forever or until you disappeared. It’d make you realize how useless and tiny your life ended up being in comparison to the world and the universe and all that, wouldn’t it? I think that would be a sort of hell for a lot of people. Yeah, for a lot of people, but not for me.

I think the ice is where I went when I was put to sleep, or where I come from when I wake up. The sleep itself is the deep, heavy type that erases you. The type where, when you finally wake up, it takes a long, violent effort to pull your soul back into your body.

First I hear the alarm. It invades the cold place where I am, the kind of grating buzzsaw of sound that wriggles in the ear like a live yellow jacket. I become slowly aware of my body. My fingers twitch, my mouth compresses, a frown knifes between my brows, the movements automatic and basic, stored in the muscles, animal instinct more than anything else. 

I struggle to open my eyes. My brain, sluggish, clings to the alarm sound, groping for any kind of anchor. 

Where am I? 

The memories that filter in to try and answer that question are inadequate. I’m not in the hospital bed. I’m cold. I feel different. The surface pressed into my back and legs is hard and unforgiving, not a mattress but metal. My breath is close, the only warm thing, and I must still be dreaming. I tell myself this. This is another nightmare. It has to be. A red light flashes beyond my eyelids, in sync with the omnipresent sound.

I force my eyes open to an iced-over circle of glass above me, a porthole like a submarine. My arms jerk up, still not totally in my control, and hit a metal lid. A coffin, I think. A strange, sci-fi coffin, straight out of Star Trek. When it comes, the realization is clinical, languorous. I’m trapped.

Beyond the circle of glass, the red-light blares, the sound distant and muted through the walls of this new prison. This could be a dream, but maybe it isn’t. If it isn’t a dream, it has to be real, and I’m not sure I believe that, either.

I flex my hands at my side, make a fist and release, once and then twice, testing the precision of my fine motor skills and my still-limited control over my own body. Satisfied, I shove at the lid above me. The hinges shatter, and it goes flying - banging and skidding across the floor.

I am not surprised at this display of strength, though I should be. I wasn’t this strong when I last remember falling asleep. There is no time to linger, though, to gape or wonder at myself. I sit up and boost myself out of the container I’m in, dropping to the floor in a crouch, still braced against my would-be coffin. My limbs buzz with the fresh circulation, my brain a mishmash of old sleep and adrenaline.

I’m in a small storage room with a concrete floor and cinderblock walls. The fourth wall is made up of containment units like mine, five wide and three deep. It feels like a morgue, fifteen drawers, all but mine shut tight, and I half feel for my chest on instinct, though I know there’s no black-threaded Y there, all my organs unmolested by any curious coroner. Pity. 

I wonder idly if they’d still let me be an organ donor, after everything that happened. Liver failure, or a part of me with you forever? I’m interested in what the answer to that question would be. For all their faith in science and so-called common sense, I think maybe Americans are a more carnal, superstitious people than they give themselves credit for. This has certainly been my experience.

The only indicator that these drawers are meant for cold bodies instead of dead ones is the tiny display in the upper corner of each unit, a little green light indicating that all but two – mine and one other in the bottom left corner - are in use. The air is cold and still. The light is orange and hazy. My breath comes in a cloud. 

I look to the door, a thick, steel number that would be at home in a walk-in freezer or a bank. The metal was covered in frost, inches thick I would guess, but now a heat on the other side has caused it to melt in a weeping cascade of water and chunks of ice. It has been left cracked open, both the haze and the orange light spilling in from beyond it. Smoke, carrying with it the acrid reek of melted carpet and burning plastic, hangs in the air like a gauzy curtain, the bulk of it gathered in a foul, cloud-like blanket against the ceiling.

From here, I can see the heat pouring through the inches-wide gap in the door in shimmering waves. A few steps and I hit the wall of heat, almost a physical force, dry more than anything else. I step through it, toward the door, and though I can feel the heat, (its dryness and its intensity prickle against my skin), it doesn’t touch me.

This is also strange. I glance back at the other containment units before I reach for the lip of the door. I know that there are likely others in those units, sleeping as I had been. I don’t know them. And the one thing that is not strange or different about this situation is this fact: I owe no one but myself survival. 

The different factors and scenarios click through my head in a matter of seconds, quick and ordered as they’ve ever been. No, I don’t know the people kept in the other fourteen containment units. I don’t know what they want or need. I don’t know what drives them. I don’t know who they’re loyal to, or how they’ll react to me. They might not know me, either, but that doesn’t mean they will hesitate to hurt me, out of perceived necessity or simple desire. My origin foreshadows theirs, and I have to assume they’re dangerous, brutal, and unnatural. Just like I am. 

Also, there is a fire burning just outside the door, and while the heat doesn’t seem to affect me all that much, nor the smoke really interfere with my ability to breathe, its existence gives me a couple important details. One: the building I’m being kept in has likely been evacuated. This means my way is probably clear. Two: the way might not remain clear for very much longer. First responders will arrive to put out the fire, to search for and treat any survivors. I don’t know how long I’ve been in here. I can’t begin to guess where I am yet, or how quick the response time will be. 

The fact that my drawer has been pulled out, that the door to this vault is open, and even the fire itself, makes me suspect that I’ve been woken on purpose, and that my would-be rescuer has gone to extravagant lengths to help me escape. The why of it is a question for later. I’ve been subject to the whims and wills of other people before. It isn’t new, and I don’t have the time to muse over it. 

I pull the door open. It feels heavy, like it should require more effort to open than it takes. It swings inward on silent hinges and I step back out of its way. Smoke pours into the room. The alarm blares in a metal cage near the ceiling outside, the noise piercing. I jam my hands over my ears and skirt around a desk located immediately outside the door, its occupant sagged in a desk chair, chin to his chest. He wears a blue polyester suit and a clip-on tie, and he is very dead, shot in the chest three times.

Flames lick at the files scattered across his desk, paper blackened at the edges and curling up like dead leaves. Frayed wiring suggests that a computer of some sort has been cut free and stolen. I skirt around this man and keep going.

The fire, I see now, is deliberate in its burning. There isn’t much in this corridor it could use as fuel, but it has found what little there is with a cleverness that belongs to human fingers and a struck match and a faint seamy whiff of gasoline. The carpet burns to melted black patches in places. Posters shrivel on the wall, snowing in fat gray flakes of ash to the floor. It looks like a waiting room, or the remnants of a waiting room, the foam and plastic and upholstery of the chairs melting and burning in small clumps of flame.

I keep going, toward the exit sign that glows at the far end of the room.

The door out leans lopsidedly in its frame, the frosted glass partition on either side shattered by the heat into little safety-glass cubes that have cascaded over the floor. A small square of fried machinery sits about halfway up the metal doorframe, blackened, its components fused together, a would-be lock. The door itself is charred, the fire licking at its bottom half, but I don’t have to touch it, slipping through the opening just big enough for my body. Outside, I find a long hallway stretching in either direction. The alarm still blares, a jittery background noise, but the sprinkler heads embedded in the ceiling have either tried and failed to stop the fire or never tried at all. An elevator stands directly across from the door. On either side are a janitor’s closet and a unisex bathroom respectively, the signs for them barely visible through the thickening wall of smoke, but the last door at the end of the hall is the one I’m looking for: the exit, the red letters glowing through the smoke a boon pointing the way. 

I keep moving, at a quick, efficient pace just short a run, down the hall and toward the exit, skirting between two more dead people, apparently rolled out of the way to clear a path, and I don’t look at them. The fire has gotten to them, anyway, the smell of charred flesh joining the riot of the others, and if I don’t look I can pretend they were never really people in the first place. 

I push through the door under the exit sign and find myself in a stairwell. The air is cooler here, and clearer, the fire apparently contained to the corridor behind me.

A sign next to the door says I’m on sublevel 1. The basement. This makes sense. I peer up the stairs, cocking my head so I can hear better. There’s no one in the stairwell, at least, no sound of breath or unconscious shuffle of feet beneath the still-steady blare of the alarm. I turn back to the sign briefly, tracing my fingers over the company logo inscribed above the label. It’s a caduceus, a staff with two snakes wrapped around it, the symbol of the Roman god from whom Mercury got its name. Mercury.

It was them.

I suspected this, since the second I woke up, though I couldn’t name the suspicion concretely until right now. I don’t have time to linger, but I do, a few seconds more. They got to me. How, why, I can only guess. 

Whoever did this, whoever let this happen, whether it was the U.S. government itself or the private company that ran the prison they stuck me in, if it was an individual or a conspiracy, doesn’t matter all that much. When it comes down to it, it was all of them, wasn’t it? It was all of them. They bargained with Mercury and they let this happen. And why not? Why shouldn’t they? In a way, I deserved this, didn’t I? In a way, I asked for it.

I remember the cold dark of the Antarctic wasteland I wandered while I slept. How long had I been locked away in that glorified meat locker? If the person who got me out hadn’t done so, how much longer would it have been? And what would have happened if it weren’t them but Mercury who woke me up? What was it they wanted from me?

Thinking of my mysterious benefactor makes me think that whoever did all this chose me on purpose. Why? 

I snatch back my hand from the corporate logo, as if the two snakes could lash out from the molded plastic and bite me. I can’t waste time on this. I have to keep going. 

I move upward, a flight of stairs bringing me to ground level and an identical door, labeled as level one. I open it a crack and peer out.

The entire building must have been evacuated, and if I had to guess, I’d say the only reason no one secured the walk-in freezer in sublevel one is because it is literally on fire. Or they tried to secure it and ended up dead and barbequed in the hallway downstairs. The location of that room is a bizarre, disastrous little secret on its own, the location in the basement combining with the multiple robust doors and melted security mechanisms and weird would-be waiting room to support this fact. Mercury didn’t just want to keep me and my thirteen comrades from getting out, but to keep anyone else from getting in. This explains the scene I witness as I lean further out the door. 

Mercury has stored me in the bottom of what appears to be a corporate office building. From the doorway, I see a pristine lobby, complete with the caduceus logo glossed on the marble floor. There are potted rubber plants, an intimidating front desk, and a wall of windows that look out onto a crowded city street. Through the windows, I see a firetruck with its lights still going, and as I push out a little further, I see the pant-suited pedestrians gawking from a respectable distance, a few of them sooty and singed, most of them wearing cloth face masks over their noses and mouths. There are two ambulances half on the sidewalk, and, at the center of the scene, a sooty man in a neat suit chest to chest with a firefighter in full gear.

The man stands with his arms crossed, back to me. The firefighter’s face is red with rage as they gesture at the building. The glass is tinted, so I’m not worried about them seeing me. I don’t need any additional details. From all appearances, this is a stand-off, and while they posture and argue out front hopefully I can sneak out the back.

Slipping out the door, I catch the smell of smoke again, and the renewed howl of fire alarms. Sprinklers have activated in this area, the floor slick and damp underfoot, the rubber plants glistening with moisture. The smoke seems to be coming from some point beyond the lobby, maybe a ground-level corridor running parallel to the one I’m in, or maybe an upper floor. It’s too much smoke to be coming from the computers at the front desk, slim hard drives giving off singed wisps, all of them hopelessly fried. 

Before I go anywhere, though, I need real clothes, so I slip out into the lobby and glance around for a directory, pressed against the wall behind a particularly tall rubber plant even though I know no one can see me from outside. The directory, faithfully hung above the entrances for the two hallways that branch off from the lobby, gives me what I need. The gym, and its unattended changing-room lockers waiting to be pilfered, lies down the hallway I’ve just left. 

I return down that way, sparing a last look over my shoulder at the confrontation between the Mercury lackey and the firefighter. Three more muscled, besuited men have appeared, all looking slick and G-man despite their singed cuffs and their sweaty, soot-stained skin. Two more firefighters have appeared behind the first as well, and behind them, I can see two others beginning to busy themselves with the truck, a third bent over a fire hydrant almost out of my line of sight.

A thought pops into my head, full formed. What if the Mercury man outside is only holding off the fire fighters so that Mercury personnel can do their own sweep? If they suspect sabotage, or escape, this could be likely. A firefighter stumbling onto me or my other friends down in the vault is probably a worst-case scenario, a leak requiring an exorbitant cover-up. I don’t sense anyone else nearby, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The prickle at the back of my neck warns me that a precautionary sweep by Mercury’s people is a more than possible scenario, as are eyes at every available exit. Still. The fact that I’m awake at all suggests that someone wants me to escape. If they could do this, they could ensure that I can make it out of here.

I remind myself that I can’t trust my would-be rescuer any more than I can trust anyone else. I have got to get out by myself, and if they cleared my path, so be it. I’m not wasting any energy on gratitude.

I pick up my pace to an almost run, scanning for security cameras as I go. Judging from the state of the computers at the front desk, I’m hoping that they’re not operational at the moment. I spot one, glossy and bug-eyed, as I turn a corner. It doesn’t look like the clunky security cameras I’m familiar with, but there’s not anything else it could be. Looking at it, there’s no way to tell if they’ve been disabled or not, and nothing I can do about it anyway, so I ignore it and the others I spot embedded in the ceiling as I continue.

The alarm still blares, the only other sound my bare feet against the wet floor. I bypass a bank of elevators and the food court and finally find the gym, the door guarded by another slick black box. So far, every door I’ve gone through has had a similar black box with a light that goes from red to green when I open them. These are security measures, likely bypassed with credentials, maybe a keycard, maybe a fingerprint or a face scan if this lock is anywhere near as high-tech as the security cameras and the computers look.

Like the other doors, this one swings open without issue and I step into the gym. The fluorescent lights are off. It is dark and still, gray daylight falling in in broad beams from the skylights overhead. Gleaming equipment lines the floor to my right, a mirror running the length of the far wall. In front of me is the front desk, and beyond it I see the doors leading to the locker room and the showers. I scan the counter in front of the desk, skipping over the display-jar of protein powder and a flyer for a Pilates class until I land on a stack of neon-orange newsletters. I pick it up and find the date. The year sears into my brain, and I can’t think anymore. 2020.

I don’t want to believe it, but everything so far supports this. My body was preserved in a sci-fi meat locker. I woke up from what I can only explain as cryofreeze. I’m stronger than I should be. That day at the hospital, the man from Mercury promised me an escape from my life, an escape that would otherwise be impossible for me. He promised me wonders. The rest of my life was a high-security prison, a tiny cell, FBI profilers trying their luck every three to five years, poking my stimulus-starved brain with a stick. 

He came to me, when I was sick and vulnerable, with a kind voice and a nice haircut. I was a still a child, though the law had made an exception and ruled me a grown-up. He looked like every sitcom dad I’d ever seen on tv. He gave me a can of cold soda fresh from the hospital vending machine. If I were ever to fall for that sort of con, it would’ve been then. I could’ve let myself be a schmuck, and who would ever blame me? 

But I told him no. I told him no, and he didn’t listen, which I should’ve expected. I viewed his visit as a fluke. What would anybody want with me? Up until they found me in that abandoned house in Bedford, I was nobody, less than nobody.

2020\. Anything is possible. 

I can’t afford to doubt this. It is real. A little quick math, and I figure it out. Thirty years. I’ve been asleep thirty years. I try and think about how old I was when I fell asleep compared to how old I should be now. Forty-six. I should be forty-six.

The newsletter crumples in my fist and drops to the floor. For the first time, my stomach turns, and I feel nauseous. The wrongness of this sits off-kilter in me, like I’ve lost my balance, and the lost years gape like a missed step in my head, a gap that shouldn’t be there. 

I don’t believe this is a dream anymore, but I prod my consciousness one more time just in case. I can hear the alarm, I can feel the cool tile of the small lobby area against the grimy soles of my feet, and the smell of the gym has replaced the faint taste of smoke with new carpet and stale sweat.

The computers at the lobby’s front desk, the cameras, even the sleek exercise equipment, aren’t signs of Mercury’s individual technological achievement, as I first assumed, but of the future. 

In a sort of dull shock, I turn to the bank of mirrors, anger and misery pulling in a familiar tightness across my chest. I have to know. I can’t walk out of this place not knowing. Slowly, through the maze of exercise equipment and stacked weights, a reflection comes into focus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, y'all. I'm having a pretty fun time. 
> 
> Is it weird to jump straight in w/ an OC character and just ask you to feel bad for him? I don't know, I'm making this all up as I go.
> 
> As a heads up: I have the whole story outlined and a good portion of it written, so uploads should be fairly consistent. 
> 
> This fic is full of angst, but I'm not taking myself too seriously here. Steve and crew should pop up shortly. Tropes et. al. incoming. That's about it. See you next week!
> 
> -Iz


	3. The Autonomous Body and Other Myths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emmett discovers the futility of his own will and the deliberate deconstruction of his body

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two notes before I start.  
> #1: I tend to use a lot of italics in my work (for emphasis, to clearly identify a character's inner thoughts). I tried to go without, but I'm too attached, and so all words or phrases meant to be in italics will be identified by single quotation marks. 
> 
> As in the examples given above:  
>  “I can’t come back tomorrow because I won’t 'be' here,” exclaims Sam.  
>  OR  
>  I shake my head, but the thought gets worse, grows louder. ‘He’s in your way. Go through him’.
> 
> So, in conclusion, feel free to read every use of single quotations as if they're italics. I'll also put a version of this head's up at the beginning of every chapter from now on, because I know I'd forget if it were me.
> 
> #2: I've been plugging away at this fic in all my spare time, and have realized just what a beast it's going to be. It has mutated and grown an egregious amount. It is already longer than I thought it would be, and I'm about a third of the way through my outline. I was planning on only posting one chapter a week until I finished, as a way to give myself some wiggle room.
> 
> HOWEVER, I've realized that if I do that, we will find ourselves in the Jonas' brothers' year 3000 before the whole of this monstrosity is unleashed on the internet. All this to say: Congrats to the person who enjoys this and wants more! As a reward for your support and also as a bolster to my own sense of well-being, there will now be at least two chapters released every week.
> 
> Right now, I'm planning on doing both on Thursday, but if twice-weekly is requested, I can drop one on Tuesday and one on Thursday. LMK!
> 
> Hopefully the chapter notes will never be this long again. Without further ado.

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]

It takes me an endless handful of seconds to connect the reflection to myself, to absorb the reality that I am him. At first I feel nothing, a cold blankness, the anger and misery distant as the sound of the alarms, and then something foreign and ugly grows in its place, with a weight that makes it impossible to breathe.

I have felt this only three other times: when they told me my grandma was dead, when my only friend abandoned me, and when I entered the courtroom for the first time and understood that my life as I had known it was over. 

Because I have felt this before, I know how to name it. It is a mix of grief and black-out shock, the sort of keening ache made to consume you. It is a black hole of nothing that swallows everything else, every other feeling, every scrap of stardust and light, dragging it over an unseeable event horizon where it kills it dead.

There wasn’t much that belonged to me in my life, but I had my body. It was bony, prone to stomach pain, the lungs deficient, the ears slightly out of proportion, the front tooth chipped, but it was mine. I hauled it through every shitty thing I ever went through, I kept it with everything that was ever taken from me, and now it’s gone, so irrevocably other I can’t reasonably claim it as my own.

I stare at myself in the mirror.

I don’t know why I expected to keep this one small scrap of autonomy. 

I feel nothing. I should be angry, or sad, or afraid, but there’s nothing left. It’s like my insides have been all cleaned out. 

I’ve always been slight, always been pale. I got skinnier in the last months in prison, I know this. The guards took to calling me skeleton boy. It was true. I am thin as I was then, bone and ropy cords of muscle and taut skin, but I cannot say that I am pale anymore. No, my skin is translucent, the layer of muscle keeping it from being totally see-through. I can see the blue spiderweb of veins just beneath the surface, the bulk of bone. I turn my hand under my own gaze, studying the thin ridge of the tendons, the visible knobby bone of the knuckles, half-mesmerized.

I guess I didn’t see it before because I couldn’t bear it. I still can’t. Or I don’t want to. My grandma would say I just don’t want to. 

Without trying, I think about the tissue-paper stained glass I made once with glue sticks and black construction paper. She hung it up in the window in the double-wide’s kitchen. It turned the light pink and yellow and blue on the laminate table. That was all a very long time ago.

I return my hands to my sides, watch the blank cast of my face in the mirror. I can see the suggestion of my skull, my teeth, and when I turn my head, the yellow cartilage of my nose and ears. I used to be a dark dirty blonde, but the fuzz of the buzzcut coating my skull is silvery yellow. 

My eyes were blue. I liked my eyes. They were nice, striking. Not a good attribute for a professional pickpocket, easy to pick out in a line-up, but I liked them anyway. They’re dark now. I’d call the color black, or maybe dark gray. The light is too poor for particulars.

Briefly, I try and figure out how this happened, how I got here. 

I recall falling asleep in the hospital bed with my wrist handcuffed to the railing. I recall the guards standing outside, the sound of their low voices blending with the thunder and the rain pouring down the windows. I recall cushioning my cheek with my free hand, and how the pillowcase was damp with sweat and guilt.

I recall the eighteen years leading up to that moment, too, distantly, as if through a veil. The reflection in front of me reminds me of each excruciating detail in turn, flashing through my head like a VHS tape on rewind, too quick and grainy to really catch. 

Whatever Mercury has done, they made me stronger, more resistant to heat and cold. And, I guess, eye to eye with the cold gray gaze of my reflection, they have tampered with my ability to panic. I am afraid, but I am only as afraid as I need to be, and I know I cannot stay here. The boy who trembled alone and sick in that hospital bed might as well be dead. I look like what I am, for the very first time. MONSTER. That headline, garish and sensational, finally matches. I wonder idly if they would let me retake my mugshot. 

I snort to myself, amused, and put my back to the mirror, retreating to the locker rooms and leaving the strange, skeletal reflection behind. 

Knowing what I look like gives me useful information. I can’t move through crowds or down the street thinking that I’ll blend in, because I won’t. Everything else I’ll reckon with when I’m out of Mercury and not at risk of being caught.

In the men’s locker room, locker doors stand ajar, duffels abandoned on benches. I hear one of the showerheads dripping in the back. It takes me three minutes, maybe less, to scavenge a t-shirt and sweats. Shoes prove themselves a bit trickier, the sizing less up for debate, but I find a pair of Jordans within half a size of my feet, nice enough I might be able to pawn them later for extra cash. I discover a little money in a wallet, too, and I fold it up and tuck it away. After that, I discover a windbreaker but no heavier coats, along with a knit black cap I pull down over my ears. I flip the hood of the sweatshirt up to hide my face, looping a cloth mask I found over my ears. Judging from the brief glance I got of the street, most people are wearing these. I don’t have to know why, so long as I know it’ll help me to blend into a crowd.

There’s an emergency exit at the back of the locker room, but I ignore it. I can’t emerge on the street anywhere close to here. I don’t know for sure if they’ll be looking for me specifically, but I can’t risk the attention a fight or a chase could bring. I’ve got to get away, get a head start. This works best in my favor if they don’t figure out I’m missing until I’m long gone. It might already be too late for that.

I get back to the stairwell and go up, sprinting now, listening hard. Smoke clogs the small glass window leading to level 6. I don't hear any human sounds. The building is completely locked down, and completely deserted. When I reach the roof, I find the door to it guarded by a manual lock as well as an electrical one, the door itself insulated and thicker than the others I've encountered.

Without hesitating, a grab the handle and yank. It comes off with a snap, a clean sound that fails to carry much under the wail of the alarm. I glance up at the rotating red light over my head, wondering why no one’s bothered to turn if off yet. Maybe they can’t.

I toss the handle aside and the door falls open, leading me out onto the roof, covered in gravel and huge air-conditioning units and other apparatus twice as large as me, rumbling sedately. The alarm cuts off when the door clangs shut behind me, leaving only the muffled silence that comes with snow.

It falls in big flakes from a low, colorless sky, with a weight like a light touch where it settles on my shoulders and in my eyelashes. A thin layer coats the gravel. From very far away, I hear the sound of sirens and the rumble of the street traffic below.

The building to the left is level with this one, the one to the right taller. In the limited look I had out the front windows of the lobby, I guessed I was in a city, the sort of busy, close-quartered city that would make what I’m about to attempt possible. I’m glad I’m right. 

I don’t know what sort of escape the person who did this planned for me, or if they anticipated me making it this far at all. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’ve eyed the distance between this building and the next, and I know that with a running start I can clear it.

I back up a bit and get into a starting position, the crouch familiar from pell-mell street races as a little kid and close calls running away from cops and store owners when I got older. It feels good, and a smile creeps up my face. I take a deep breath of the bracing air and launch myself at the edge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reading Frankenstein for spooky season, and found this quote from the creature's ruminations appropriate: "My person was hideous...what did this mean? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them" (Shelley). 
> 
> Thanks for sticking around! I'll be posting the next chapter momentarily. :) 
> 
> -Iz


	4. The Short Shelf-Life of Infamy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emmett dwells on his past and the people in it and also finds a place to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Note Before I Start:  
> I tend to use a lot of italics in my work (for emphasis, to clearly identify a character's inner thoughts). I tried to go without, but I'm too attached, and so all words or phrases meant to be in italics will be identified by single quotation marks. 
> 
> As in the examples given above:  
> “I can’t come back tomorrow because I won’t 'be' here,” exclaims Sam.  
> OR  
> I shake my head, but the thought gets worse, grows louder. ‘He’s in your way. Go through him’.
> 
> So, in conclusion, feel free to read every use of single quotations as if they're italics. I'll also put a version of this head's up at the beginning of every chapter from now on, because I know I'd forget if it were me.
> 
> Without further ado.

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]:

I land hard on the other side, flinging myself into a roll to distribute the force of the impact. When I leap to my feet I listen for any sign from below that someone has spotted me. The thick fall of the snow. My breathing. Silence. 

Satisfied, I keep moving, checking quickly to see if I’ve hurt myself, finding no evidence of scrapes or even the tender places where bruises would form. Good. 

This building has a fire escape within manageable reach from the roof. I take the ladder down, paint and rust flaking off under my hands. The escape itself creaks, but holds, and I pause every so often to listen as I make my way down, but no one sees me or comes after me. 

The ladder that leads to the ground has rusted in place, so I make the six-foot jump on my own. The impact sings up into my shoulders, but it doesn’t hurt, or even ache. The alley itself is open on either end, empty except for giant green dumpsters and gritty iced-over puddles. I head the way Mercury isn’t, coming out on a drab gray sidewalk. 

Corporate people in overcoats and expensive knit scarves press in both directions, bags on their shoulder or shiny briefcases in hand, their footsteps turning the fresh-fallen snow to dirty slush, most of them masked. Traffic crushes the street. I spot a couple taxis, and a bus stop about half a block away.

Looking around, I recognize the sullen sprawl of the skyline, the particular stench of the city, different now, the cars sleeker, the billboards glitzier, everything else a little more worn at the edges, drabber and dingier than I remember but still busy and obstinate, forlorn in its way; the height of the buildings isolated in the snow and the particular bitter cold of the wind, far away from the life and movement of the street below, where I now am. 

It’s almost relief I feel, like seeing a familiar face in a crowd. I’m back in Detroit. Mercury may have made me into a monster, but they’ve brought me home. 

No one looks at me. No one here cares. I shove my hands in my pockets and move with the flow of foot-traffic, my head down. The cameras are a little easier to spot, now. I see them at the crosswalks, guarding storefronts.

I think maybe I’ll get the hang of where I am if I keep walking, but I don’t, and one block passes, and then two. I duck down an alley to avoid a slick-looking black car that probably means nothing, peering around the corner to watch it slide away, my scalp prickling. There’s a cop, too, a little way after that, but he’s idling back to his car, a steaming cup in his hands. I watch him drive off, allowing myself a self-satisfied smile. Bastard. If only he knew.

I don’t see any of Mercury’s guys. This makes me edgier. If they’re smart, they’ll be around, doing an under-the-radar search while the cops and everyone else are preoccupied with the scene at the building. I don’t spot anyone following me, and no Mercury people, in uniform or out. 

Eventually, I make it out of the downtown, into a more industrial area. It’s emptier, a lot of the buildings boarded up, the cameras I see busted or broken. I pass a car with snow covering its roof and hood, the front right tire so flat it has melted into the pavement, the rest of the vehicle on cinderblocks. A few people pass me, including some homeless folks. I would nod at them normally, and I might have to make some friends come nightfall if I can’t find a place to crash, but I’m trying to move under the radar for now, so I don’t.

If I wanted to do so, I could follow the coded indicators that would lead me to a safe place – maybe a trusted shelter or soup kitchen or somewhere to squat for the night, and though this objectively seems like a smarter plan, I don’t want to do it.

Thirty years later, would these people still recognize my face? Any cover-up by Mercury would have me escaped and middle-aged or dead, I know, but the trial itself had been a media circus and the judge, when she sentenced me, proclaimed that I had become infamous. Her exact phrasing – 'a household name'. I remember the cold thrill that went through me when she said it, like a blade sinking into flesh, so bone deep and visceral I felt sick.

Instead of risking human interaction, I spot a car impound lot and turn left, away from the booth manned by a sleepy looking guy with three chins and a ponytail. At the opposite end of the lot, I eye the sagging chain link, topped with barbed wire. Beyond it is a maze of cars, various makes and models and states of repair, dusted with a light coating of the still-falling snow.

This is a stupid idea, but I do it anyway. One leap, vertically, with a couple steps for momentum. It works, and I launch myself smoothly through the thin air and land with a thump on the other side. It shouldn’t be possible, but it is. As I’ve learned, anything is possible.

Once I was innocuous, a troubled teenager, the kind of kid suburban parents feared would push drugs on their clean-cut well-fed middle-class children. By trade and practice, I’d been a pick-pocket and small-con whose most pressing concern day to day had been finding a warm place to crash for the night. Then, on a sunny autumn afternoon in 1989, I lost two hours and woke up in the living room of an abandoned house in an outer suburb of Detroit called Bedford, an icepick in my hand. The pick itself had been coated in gore, and I was covered in blood all the way up to my elbow, my shoes sticky with it, my shirt and face spattered. The body of Sarah Marshall lay a couple feet away, at that point still alive, but barely. Toby Shaw, her boyfriend, was facedown and dead out in the hall. 

In present day, I crouch down and begin to scan the vehicles, searching for one I know I can break into without setting off any alarms. I spot one and creep over, the color of Sarah Marshall’s cardigan still vivid in my mind, the memory of periwinkle bright and hyperreal against the unchanging landscape of muted paintjobs and tire rims and snow.

Minutes after I’d woken up, still in shock, I’d been thrown to the ground and handcuffed. I don’t remember the door being kicked open. The living room had a boarded-over bay window. Through the chinks in the rotting wooden planks, I could’ve seen the melee of cop cars, the yellow letters on the FBI jackets, but I didn’t know to look. Sitting on that bare floor, staring down at my own hands, I couldn’t process what I was seeing. I remember distinctly the tackiness of the half-dry blood, the way the grit and dust clung to my skin. The revulsion rose in my throat as I understood the smell and where it came from, as I looked up and saw Sarah Marshall across from me, sprawled like a ragdoll, but real, her blood pooled beneath her. When they breached the house, I didn’t hear it, not the creak and splinter of wood as the decayed doorframe gave way or all the footsteps or the yelling. I was still looking at Sarah Marshall, trying to connect what I saw with the clearly used weapon in my hand, but it didn’t make any sense. When they arrested me, the agent wrenched my arms behind my back so hard it hurt and forced me to my stomach on the cold, filthy floor. With my cheek pressed to bare wood like that, I’d been eye to eye with her. I remember her eyes being blue like mine, but in all the pictures they showed in the courtroom later, they’d been brown.

In the impound lot, miles and years away from that house in Bedford, I begin to break into the truck.

I knew through the whole thing that I hadn’t hurt her. I knew I hadn’t killed anyone. I knew it the way you know your own mother, the way you know whether a dog is mean or not. I just 'knew'. 

That gut knowledge couldn’t go toe to toe with all the evidence, though. I couldn’t explain myself, and they were able to connect the ice pick to a young mother and her son who’d been murdered in their home a couple months prior. Their names were Marie and Jamie St. Clair, the crime had been just as grotesque, the crime scene just as empty of remorse, and so I’d gotten life without parole.

The prosecutors wanted me dead, but I was too young, and they couldn’t kill me. I was expected to regard this as a happy stroke of luck. The serial murderer, gleeful and still kicking. 

I force the car door open with a sharp yank, trying not to pull too hard, still unused to the new strength in my limbs. It comes open and I crawl into the backseat, pull the door shut behind me, and curl up on the cold leather. The snow blankets the windshield and rearview, making the light strange and muted, the interior of the car eerily still. My breath fogs in the brittle air. I should shiver, but I don’t, my hands tucked in my armpits out of habit.

Unsure what else to do, because what else can I do, I close my eyes.

I am alone, and something inexplicable has happened to me, something both awful and momentous. There is so much I don’t understand and can’t begin to guess. What and why and how don’t matter that much. I learned in the aftermath of that bloody afternoon in Bedford that clues can’t be trusted to solve mysteries. What matters most right now is that I am alone, I escaped, I survived, and despite all that, I still have to lay here by myself and remember all the bad things that ever happened to me.

I thought my grandma dying would be the worst thing. Then I thought Brendan, my first and only real friend, leaving would be the worst thing. I thought what I had to do to stay alive would be the worst thing, and then I thought Sarah Marshall’s last breath and dead boyfriend would be the worst things. Somehow, it kept devolving, into the interrogation room and the court room and all the people hating me, silently or quietly or at full volume. After that, it’d been day after day in my cell, watching the daylight scrape over the floor, the self-doubt creeping into my hands first, and then my head. I remembered the grip of the icepick against my palm. Maybe I did do it.

It was the only answer that made any sort of sense. That’s why everyone else believed it.

Now, I don’t know.

It all repeats itself. I keep waking up into real nightmares. Before Bedford, life used to be a regular low-grade nightmare. The nightmare of motel bedsheets and fold-out couches, of sporadic hot meals and canned food, of always being cold. Then Bedford. Then the aftermath of Bedford, where I finally got a bed to sleep in and food delivered to my door, but everything else had all turned wrong. Now Mercury, and the backseat of this shitty truck, and it’s back to what it always was before, but I’m not cold anymore.

I can’t figure out what comes next. I don’t really want to know. No matter what happened to me, no matter where they put me or where I ended up, I didn’t just leave it be. I fought, as hard as I could for as long as I could in every way I knew how. Mostly, I failed. I’ll probably fail again now. But I have to try. I can’t make it easier for any of the sick fucks who did this to me. 

Outside, the light begins to fade. I think I fall asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll see you next week with two fresh chapters, in which we will finally hear from our favorite heroes. 
> 
> Thanks for sticking around!
> 
> -Iz


	5. Mid-Western Winters, No Parking Zones, and Other Inconveniences

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sam hates the cold and Steve loses something precious

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Note Before I Start:  
> Finally! At last! Our MCU pals enter the narrative. I'm preternaturally excited for this. From now on, first-person OC POVs are going to alternate with third-person canon character POVs. 
> 
> Also, a Reminder on italics!
> 
> All words or phrases meant to be in italics will be identified by single quotation marks.
> 
> For example:  
> “I can’t come back tomorrow because I won’t 'be' here,” Sam exclaims.  
> OR  
> I shake my head, but the thought gets worse, grows louder. ‘He’s in your way. Go through him’.
> 
> So, in conclusion, feel free to read every use of single quotations as if they're italics. 
> 
> Etc. Etc. Onward!

[Sam Wilson POV]:

Sam hates the cold. He has lived in it for most of his life, first in New York and then in DC, and thus has resigned himself to it, but he hates it with an irrational gall he applies to little else in his life. As night drops over the city, it grows colder, and he resents it. He should be inside, watching shitty cable on a motel tv. 

Instead, he tracks a lead straight to a dead end and out of a dive bar. Steve waits outside, leaning against the grimy brick of the building, straightening as Sam exits.

“Anything?”

Sam shakes his head. “Not so much.”

Local law enforcement had promised them a lead on a suspect for the Mercury explosion, but as usual when it comes to the cops, they had turned over the proffered stones and found a whole lot of nothing.

“Pity,” Steve says. “What’s the likelihood we come all the way out here, and it all goes to shit the second we touch down?”

“It’s weird,” Sam admits, “But not an abnormal amount of weird. Could be coincidence.”

“They’re up to something,” Steve insists. “Those smarmy corporate bastards make my skin crawl. I’d bet money none of them have ever told the whole truth once in their miserable lives.”  
“You think Mercury had something to do with today?” 

Steve puts his hands in his pockets, and they both start to walk back to Sam’s car. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. This is too haphazard and obvious for them.”

Sam pulls out his keys, thoughtful. “Yeah. That’s true. You know, I thought Hydra was being overdramatic about the whole cut-off-one-head-and-two-will-grow-in-its-place thing, but this is ridiculous.”

They walk a few blocks, finally rounding a corner to find the space where Sam’s car should be. It’s empty. Sam stops in his tracks and then lets out a humorless laugh. “You’re kidding me. They towed my fucking car.” He throws up his hands and puts his back to the spot. “Whatever. That thing was a piece of junk anyway. Let’s just call an Uber.”

“Sam,” Steve says, and something about his voice makes Sam pause.

“What’s wrong?”

Steve takes a deep, bracing breath. “You’re going to be upset.”

“I’m not going to be upset, just tell me what’s wrong.”

“I left the box in your car. In the glove box.”

Sam swallows the sudden urge to swear. “If you’re going to bring that thing everywhere with you, you’ve got to keep it on your person. Didn’t I say that?”

“You did say that.”

“Why’s it so hard to just put it in your pocket, man?”

Steve ducks his head, shy. In the circle of the orange streetlight, he is young and cowlicked and unsure, and Sam tries to remember that for all his strength, Steve doesn’t know much about the cold, open water the box represents.

“I’m sorry,” he relents. “I shouldn’t have yelled. I’ll figure out where my car’s at.”

Relief breaks over Steve’s face. “While you do that, I’ll call a cab."

“All right, let’s do this.” Sam pulls out his phone to call the number on the towing sign. Steve stands beside him, blowing puffs of condensation into the chilly air, frowning down as he dials the number for a cab. Snow falls in fat, effervescent flakes, catching thick in the shaft of the streetlight above them.

After a few seconds of waiting in silence, Steve says, “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it, man. What’re friends for?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second chapter incoming! I know this was short, which is part of the reason why I decided to post two chapters/week. Sam will be back next week, along with other familiar faces (and ships).
> 
> See you in a sec
> 
> -Iz


	6. Of All the Impound Lots in All the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sam owns a truck (weird?) and Emmett has a filthy mouth and generally bad attitude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome back! not much to add except the usual.
> 
> I like italics, but italics are hard to convey in this format, so...I'm using single quotation marks instead. 
> 
> Examples:  
> “He is not a ‘puppy’, Steve,” Sharon exclaims.  
> OR  
> ‘He knows you can take him. That’s why he’s scared of you.’ Again, I ignore the voice, stuffing my fists between my knees.
> 
> Start your engines and let's go I guess.

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]:

A voice wakes me up, and it must be hours later, because it is completely dark now, and way colder, though the cold still doesn’t really touch me. The voice sounded close, like a person talking from the front seat, but as I sit up I recognize that it comes from the direction of the impound lot’s front gate, dozens of yards away.

“Listen, man, I need my car.” 

When I realize where it’s coming from, the voice goes tinny, echoing as if through a bad telephone connection. Then, as I focus on it, it snaps back into place, clear and close, as if the conversation has relocated back to the front seat. 

“That’s my car right there,” the voice that originally woke me up continues, “I can see it from here. I’ve got my keys, I called to confirm, it’s all set.” 

“Read the sign, hotshot. You got the 75 dollars as cash or check?” a second man says stolidly. 

The first man replies, sullen, “No.”

“Can you go back in time an hour and try and pick up your car before eight o’clock, like the sign says?” the guy asks, “No? Then I suggest you come back tomorrow when the lot’s actually open.” 

He has a mean-spirited sharpness that doesn’t line up with the pudgy guy I saw manning the booth earlier. The shifts must have switched, I realize. This is sleepy ponytail guy’s replacement.

I can practically see him crossing his meaty arms and glaring down his nose at the first man, who is…a smaller Black guy. 

I blink hard and rub my eyes, the conversation fading out like a bad radio signal. For a moment, I’d been able to picture both of them just by hearing their voices. I know the security guard is White and gigantic and late twenties probably, the sort of muscled that belongs to professional boxers, with a full sleeve of colorfully inked tattoos, and I know the man arguing with him is smaller in comparison, athletically built, early thirties maybe, with an alert military air. I also know he has a sharp jawline, a broad nose, and a gap between his front teeth. 

With effort, I tune back into the conversation, my heart beating harder against my ribs.

“…Sam, we can just take a cab. It’s fine.” Another voice comes abruptly into focus. 

This man is also White, but a freckled G.I. Joe type, dirty blonde, straight teeth, broad-shoulders, and tall, though not as tall as tattoo guy. He’s not as densely muscled as the other two, but he has the same clipped, uniformed air as his companion, a brusque efficiency in the way he moves. There’s something in the way he speaks, though, that’s markedly different from his friend, something that raises the hair at the back of my neck. 

He has an air of unassuming authority I associate with evangelical preachers and efficient politicians and propaganda adds from the 1940s. 'All-American', I think, automatically tensing up. 

“We’re not taking a cab,” the first man - Sam - says impatiently. “It’s not about that. I need access to this car, right now.”

“No means no, buddy,” tattoo guy says testily.

If I stay put, I should be fine. I need to wait for them to go away, that’s all. I tell myself this but lower myself to the floor and grip the handle of the door furthest from them, ready to tumble out and run if I need to get away. 

At the front gate, the conversation continues, Sam talking louder now.

“Listen, I’ve had a long day already. I don’t even need to take the car. It can die peacefully out here, I don’t care, I just need to get into it before that happens, okay?”

“I don’t know how to state this any clearer than I already have,” tattoo man says gruffly. “You wanna get into your car, you wanna take it, I don’t give a shit, you’re going to have to do it tomorrow. I’m the security guard, that’s it, I’m not allowed to let you in.”

“I can’t come back tomorrow because I won’t 'be' here,” Sam exclaims. “I’ve got to be on a flight at 6 AM, and I need what’s in my car before I leave. Come on, man, I didn’t mean to raise my voice, just work with me here.”

“It’s not my problem you got your car towed, pal, flight or no flight. I can’t help you.”

“How much?” All-American asks suddenly.

“Excuse me?” says tattoo man.

“My friend hasn’t got the seventy-five bucks,” All-American says smoothly. “Let’s just say I do. How much to let us see his car?”

Tattoo man wavers, and All-American closes in.

“You can watch us the entire time if you want, and he doesn’t need to take the car out of here, he just needs to get in the glove box, right Sam?”

“That’s right,” Sam says hastily, and I hear jingling. “Look, I’ve got the keys right here. The registration’s in the glovebox, too.”

“How much?” All-American repeats. “Seventy-five? A hundred?”

I hear paper rustling, the pulpy green money sound of bills being sorted through. 

Tattoo guy sighs. “C’mon, man.”

“How much they pay you? Thirteen, fifteen bucks an hour? Little more, little less?” All-American continues, tone guileless and warm. “I’ve got a hundred bucks for you right here. Easy money.”

“Look at us,” Sam says. “Do we look like the kind of people who make trouble? In and out, ten minutes tops.”

“What’s your name?” All-American asks. “Marcus, right? I get it, you’re an honest guy trying to do your job, make a living. You help me out, I help you out. It’s reciprocity, plain and simple, goods in exchange for services rendered. C’mon. What do you say.”

After a long, tense minute, Marcus says, “Hundred and fifty.”

“Done.”

Money exchanges hands, and Sam utters a long breath of relief. 

“Ten minutes,” Marcus says, the gate rattling and scraping over concrete. I hear footsteps crunching through snow, getting closer, and my shoulders tense. There are hundreds of cars in this lot. They probably won’t be coming anywhere close to me. 

“Damn,” Sam says. “How many vehicles you got here?”

“I don’t know,” Marcus grunts. “Hurry up.”

“Yeah, all right, I can’t see worth shit. You got a light, Steve?”

“Easy, Sam,” All-American – Steve – says, and the thin beam of a flashlight skitters over the snowy windshield before darting away. They can’t be more than a dozen yards from me. 

“Thanks, man,” Sam says. Then, to Marcus, “You haven’t happened to have seen an ancient gold Ford F150, because that’d make this whole process a lot easier.”

“No. Seven minutes.”

Sam heaves a heavy sigh and then the car chirps around me, locks disengaging. Without pausing, I fling myself out the door, somersaulting out of a crouch, and run. 

“What the hell.” “What was that?” the voices mix and blur behind me. “What are you pulling?” “I don’t know what the fuck that…was that a person?” “You tell me, that’s your fucking car.”

“Check the glove box,” All-American commands, and he’s behind me, moving fast, but I’d bet the clothes on my back I’m faster. The speed is exhilarating, the wind whipping through my stolen clothes. A laugh rips out of me and I pick up my pace. 

He’ll never catch me.

I’m almost to the fence, dodging in between cars, sliding over snow-pillowed hoods. He’s gaining, which shouldn’t be possible, but I can hear his breath, his even heartbeat, and the chain link stretches in front of me. Adrenaline sings in my head, and I feel high and addled and strong as homemade moonshine. 

I vault atop the hood of an SUV, the snow slipping under my shoes, and jump onto its roof, the fence and gleaming barbed wire an easy distance, and launch myself over. All-American swears and comes after me, taking the same path, struggling to find purchase in his fancy dress loafers. I land hard on the sidewalk as he jumps after me. 

As I make to take off again, my toe catches on the uneven lip of the sidewalk and I sprawl forward onto my hands. I leap up and try and spin around, but I’ve messed up and given him an edge, and he tackles me from behind. We both crash to the ground, wind knocked out of me. 

He uses his full weight to pin me, knee between my shoulder blades, one arm yanked behind my back. He’s heavier than I expected, and stronger. His grip is practical, only meant to restrain me. I can feel his touch through my coat, and it burns.

“I’m just looking for a civil conversation,” he says.

“Let me go.” I wriggle in his grip and he readjusts his hold, so tight that if I try and get out of it, I’ll dislocate my shoulder. 

“Relax. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Your mistake,” I grunt, and twist so hard my arm pops out of its socket. He lets go in surprise and I roll out from under his knee and to my feet, my back to the chain link fence, facing him. He stares at me, confusion written over his face. It’s hard to tell in the grainy orange of the streetlight, but he looks like I expected, clean-cut and handsome, the cloth mask he wears hiding the bottom portion of his face.

“Stay back,” I say. “I mean it.”

I feel Sam and Marcus approach from the left, come around the long way, Sam tugging down his mask and breathing heavily, Marcus huffing just behind him. My skin itches with the feeling of being penned, in, trapped. I try and slow the frantic hitch of my own breath. 

“It wasn’t in the glovebox, Steve,” Sam says evenly, eyes locked on me. He has a baseball bat in one hand, held low and easy at his side.

All-American - Steve - takes a step forward, his hands raised in an infuriating, placating gesture. “We’re gonna need that back son.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Whatever it is, I don’t have it,” I snarl, backing up and hitting chain link. “I said stay back!”

“Jesus,” Sam murmurs, understanding coloring his voice. “He’s just a kid.”

“Fuck you,” I spit reflexively, evaluating the distance between me and either of them. They’re trained for this, experienced, I can see it in their stances, feet apart, weight evenly distributed, relaxed but ready. 

Without questioning my instinct, I dive around Steve. He catches me by the shoulders, holding me in place. Again, his touch is so hot it sears through my thick coat.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” I hiss and push him away. He staggers and I stay where I am, pulse surging with sheer, heady panic. 

I’m a kid of scant medium build, and I don’t look strong, not near as strong as him. He manages to keep the shock off his face this time, going for a blank reserve instead. Sam comes up next to him, flipping the bat in an easy circle at his side.

“Get out of my way,” I say lowly, taking a moment to brace and tug my shoulder back into its socket. I feel the snick as it pops back in place, but it doesn’t hurt like it should. It hardly hurts at all.

“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Steve says evenly.

“Not until you give us back what’s ours,” Sam adds, “Or you turn out your pockets, so we know you don’t have it.”

“Like hell,” I say, and lunge again, this time at Sam, who swings the bat at me on reflex, aiming for my gut. I catch it midway through its arc and yank it from his grip, falling back again. 

“Easy, kid,” he says.

“Fuck you,” I spit, “Back off.”

He smiles without humor. I got him right, too. There’s the gap between his front teeth. “Me back off. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m not the one acting like I’ve lost my goddamn mind. What’s wrong with you, man?”

“Sam,” Steve warns, holding up a hand. “Listen, kid, we’re not interested in hurting you, we just wanna talk. Why don’t you drop the bat?”

I snort. “Yeah? Why don’t you try and take it from me?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Sam mutters.

“You want me to prove I don’t have your stupid box?” I say, pulling out the pockets of my jacket with one hand, “Look, I don’t have it. That not good enough for you?” I pull out the pockets of the sweatpants, flip the hoodie pocket inside out. “Check it out, guys, I’m clean. Now let me past, or I swear I will break your fucking knees with this thing.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Sam exclaims, almost laughing. “This punk!”

“No one said it was a box,” Steve interrupts, and Sam quiets, frowning.

Shit. “What else is going to fit in a glovebox?” I hedge. I don’t know what prompted me to say box, whether I guessed or whether I knew.

Sam squints at me, his brow wrinkling. Like I said, the light isn’t good, but it’s good enough. “Wait a minute. You look familiar. I know you. Where do I know you from?”

“Beats me,” I say acidly. 

I can pull off being a homeless youth, but if either of these people recognizes me as the convicted teenage serial killer, there’ll be too many questions.

“He’s not from any of our databases,” Steve says, his gaze still remote and clinical. “The initial report would’ve told us if there was anyone confirmed or of interest in the area. Nat would’ve alerted me if that changed.”

“I know that,” Sam says. “Could this have to do…?”

He lowers his voice and trails off, tiptoeing toward a secret I’m not supposed to hear. It doesn’t matter, and apparently he doesn’t even have to say it aloud, because I know all at once what he’s talking about. 'Mercury'.

“No,” Steve says, cutting him off. “It can’t be.”

“Think about it, Steve. We come here, and then all in one day, we confirm their connection with Hydra, that asshole refuses to meet with us, and the breach happens less than an hour after we leave the building. We suspected they were doing something shady.”

“Wait a second,” Marcus says suddenly. “I thought I recognized you. I saw you on that talk show with Tony Stark! You’re the Falcon. Sam Wilson, right? My nephew loves you! He’s got all your merch.”

“Now is not really the time, Marcus,” Sam says wearily. 

“That means you’re Cap, then. Why didn’t you say so? I wouldn’t have acted like such a dick,” Marcus continues, oblivious. “Wait, are you on an undercover mission? Is that what’s happening?”

At this point, I’ve lost the plot. I need to get out of here. 

“Who the fuck are you people,” I demand. “What the hell is going on? Don’t lie to me. I’ll be able to tell.”

They’re a part of something, and I know that too. Even if I couldn’t sense it, I could smell the machismo and government secrets a thousand miles away. These guys reek of it. 

“Hold on,” Sam says, turning back to me. “You don’t know who we are? How old are you?”

“I…” the question catches me off guard. I should bluff, or deflect, but I answer him. “I’m eighteen.”

Sam’s eyes narrow and he cocks his head. He doesn’t believe me. “You don’t sound so sure.”

For whatever reason, this is what gets to me. All the wrong of the last few hours tumbles together and I blurt, “I’m not. Sure, I mean.”

“Why aren’t you sure?”

Steve’s voice could have been kind, but something like calculation lingers behind it. He sizes me up in the dark, and he probably can’t see much, but he might be able to see enough. 

I’m busted. The feeling is distinct, like a millipede skittering through my gut. I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t have come here at all. If I’d followed my instinct in the first place, I wouldn’t be dealing with any of this. I’ve been stupid and naïve, and I know perfectly well that stupid and naïve gets you hurt or killed faster than anything else. 

They’ve already guessed where I’m from. They can guess the rest. 

“I’m not sure because it’s hard to keep track of time out here,” I say dully. “I don’t have your box. I’m sorry for trespassing. Please let me go.”

Steve looks at Sam, some wordless question passing between them, and Sam shakes his head. “No.”

“Sam…” Steve says in a low voice.

“No!” Sam insists. “You know the protocol. We’re on thin ice as it is. We can’t do this again.”

“I almost didn’t catch him,” Steve says, as if I’m not standing right here. “And he was too strong. You said it yourself, it can’t be a coincidence.”

“Steve,” Sam says in a warning tone. “‘Not a coincidence’ means handing this off to this area’s agent in charge and catching our flight, for once.” 

“He’s a kid, Sam.”

“No!”

At this point, they’re not paying enough attention to me, and Marcus couldn’t catch me in his dreams. I fling the bat at the two of them and take off. It clatters over the uneven pavement and both of them curse and come after me. 

This time, I have enough of a running start, and I propel myself back over the fence easily. It would probably look absurd and cartoonish to anyone watching and this amuses me, because nothing makes sense or works how it’s supposed to work, and this is only one insane example. 

Behind me, Steve shouts, “Hey! I can help you!”

I intend to keep running, make it back to the other side of the lot, leap another fence, and make a clean getaway, but I whip around instead. Steve stands on the other side of the fence, the clean glow of a white streetlight illuminating him like a hero on a stage, gleaming in his brassy hair, off the straight line of his Roman nose. He’s a little out of breath, and I allow myself a brief glow of self-satisfaction at this. There’s no sign of Sam. Too slow.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“I’ll just lie to you,” I say.

“Then lie.”

I look at him for a moment, suddenly sure of the fact that he’s got blue eyes. 'All-American'. He looks like if American exceptionalism were made in a lab, all those things you’re supposed to want to be when you grow up – male, White, heroic, handsome. 

How old is he? I thought mid-thirties originally, and that seems right. Except…something is off.

If I’d lived my years, I’d be older than he is, but there’s that same feeling of displacement that radiates from him like heat. It’s what burned when he touched me, and it’s more than that. I can sense it the same way I can sense how far he can run and what he’s feeling right now as he stands there, looking back at me.

“Nah,” I say. “You’ll get it. Wait a minute, and it’ll come to you.”

“You act like I should know you,” he says.

“Everyone knows me. Or knew me. I imagine it’d be a little hard to guess out of context.”

“You don’t have anywhere to go,” he says. “Let me help you.”

I study him a moment more, and I get it. “You’re supposed to be a hundred years old.”

“So?” He isn’t as impressed as he should be. “You have no reason to believe me, but trust me, kid, I’ve been in your position before. Don’t be stubborn about this. I can help you. I’m probably the only…”

I hear the whoosh in my peripheral just in time and jerk out of the way. The baseball bat whistles through the empty air above my head. I grab it and yank it out of Sam’s hands, because it is Sam. 

“Seriously!” I exclaim. “You’ve only got one trick, don’t you?”

Steve has distracted me so that Sam could once again try and sneak up on me from behind. He managed to be a little stealthier this time, but it isn’t enough, he’s slow and still completely human while I’m not. He recovers and swings, at my knee this time, and I stop it and tug it from his hands.

The snow-covered cars stretch in every direction around us, ghostly and monotonous and strange. I’m angry now. It buzzes in my head, drowning everything else out.

“Why can’t you leave me. ALONE.” I swing the bat into the car on my left side as hard as I can. The door buckles, the sound of crunching metal muffled by all the snow. 

“Whoa, man, take it easy,” Sam says, backpedaling, his hands up.

‘He’s in your way’. The thought is sly and quiet and almost belongs to me, blending with the buzz in my head, which has reached an insufferable pitch. I shake my head, but it gets worse, grows louder. ‘He’s in your way. Go through him’. 

“NO!” I swing the bat again, and it hits a window, glass shattering and spilling over the front seat and the snow. 

“My friend isn’t trying to trick you, all right?” Sam says. “We don’t want to hurt you, we want to help you, but we can’t do that unless you calm down.”

I press a fist to my forehead, only dimly aware of the bat in my other hand. 

“Get out of my way.”

“I can’t do that.”

“No,” I murmur, taking a step forward, the glass crunching under my feet. “Of course you can’t. You keep attacking me. You keep…”

I can hardly hear my own voice for the humming. My tongue feels loose in my mouth, clumsy and dry. I can see Sam in front of me, but he’s a vague shape, dim and meaningless as a lunar eclipse. Solid as it is, the ground doesn’t feel real beneath me. Everything is so loud. 

“You want to help me,” I repeat, and laugh. “I know what help means.”

It means being taken back to the people who did this to me in the first place, delivering me like a lost lab rat right back to Mercury’s doorstep. It means turning me over to another set of suits, to lock me up or take me apart or put me out of my misery.

I hear the chain link rattle behind me and turn in time to see Steve clamber over, looking somber as a renaissance statue. My head has cleared enough that I can see the way he looks at me, sense the hackled fear rolling off Sam. I realize I’m standing in the light now, and the hood has long since fallen from my face, the mask slipped under my nose.

“I don’t have what you’re looking for,” I say. “I promise. I’m not anyone. I’m not anybody. Just leave me alone. Just let me go.” My voice almost cracks. “Please let me go.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, and he sounds sincere.

I know if I swung at Sam’s legs right now, I could take him out at the knees, swing again at his skull and incapacitate him, maybe permanently. Steve loves Sam. Their friendship means more than catching me. He’ll stop to take care of Sam, get help, and I’ll be free. 

Something in me nudges me toward this conclusion, the buzzing in my head hitching up another octave, the thought sharp and neat as a scalpel. ‘It’ll be easy.’ The thought could be mine. It might be mine. I can’t tell. ‘Get away. You have to get away.’

But the inevitability of Sam’s body on the ground brings back Sarah Marshall and her last breath. Sam’s looking at me and his eyes are brown, too, several shades darker, but calm as hers were in that final moment, just as steady. ‘I can’t kill anyone.’ And this thought is mine. I believed I wasn’t capable of it then. I don’t want to be capable of it now. 

It occurs to me that my body doesn’t understand the difference between hurt and dead. If I hit him, I don’t know if I can hold back. The bat falls out of my numb fingers and rolls under a car, leaving a trail in the snow.

“Steve,” Sam says, and throws something to him, small and glittering as a star. Steve catches it easily and approaches me. I don’t want to fight him.

The buzzing recedes totally, the absence of it ringing in my ears. My knees have gone weak, and I can’t see straight, all my focus channeled into staying upright. He pulls me back against his chest like he’s catching me, and when I lift my hand to grab his wrist, it’s an afterthought.

“Please.” I manage. “Don’t.”

“It doesn’t seem like it now,” he murmurs, “But I’m on your side.”

He can say this because he doesn’t know who I am yet. I feel the cold pinch of a needle in the soft skin under my jaw. Consciousness slips from my weak grip, and I could let it go, retreat to the flat expanse of ice and snow that seems almost real. The northern lights echo over the back of my eyelids, phantasmic as a dream, bright as I imagine the universe to be. 

***

I can feel Steve’s breath moving through me as he lowers me to the ground, kneels next to me. 

“Easy, kid,” he says. “Easy now.”

Sam comes next to him and rests a hand on his shoulder.

“He’s fighting it,” he observes.

“Yeah,” Steve says, and goes quiet for a second. “What do we do now, Sam?”

I hear Sam answer, but the words don’t really mean anything. The snow cushions my head like a pillow and light pollution makes the sky above me orange and starless as I try to pry open my eyes. My head swims. I’ve got to stay awake. 

Back when I was a little kid, four or five maybe, I would wake up in the middle of the night with bad dreams. When this happened, I went over to my grandma’s bed, teary and scared, and whispered her name until she woke up. She would come to with a jerk, squinting at me blearily before she lifted the blankets and let me crawl in next to her.

'It’s all right, Emmy', she’d say to me. 'Come sleep with Grammy'.

There isn’t much right in the world that wasn’t right then. I can recall her smoke roughened voice so easily. She would drift off again right away after that, her snoring a comforting drone, and I’d nestle my little kid body down next to her and fall asleep like 'that'. 

I wonder if she saw me if she’d know me or if she’d claim me. Most times I don’t believe in things like God or mercy because that’s a kind of comfort the world doesn’t owe you. I don’t think it was God or mercy that let her die before she saw what became of me. I don’t know what it was. It was probably something as callous and purposeless as chance. All I know for sure is I’m glad she’s long gone.  
In the snow, with these strangers standing over me, I feel her hand brush over my brow. A small sigh slips from me. I fall asleep like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> k, that's all for now. does everything make sense so far? I've spent enough time staring at this particular section of text that I can't see anything beyond letters, white space, and typos, which multiply every time I walk away from my desk. mysterious! fun! 
> 
> if you're out there, lmk your thoughts/opinions etc. I'm going to keep pouring my words into this internet-void no matter what, but sometimes it's nice when the void talks back, ya know?
> 
> anyway.
> 
> see you next week. 
> 
> -Iz


	7. The Ethical Problem of Rescuing a Hostile, Possibly Homicidal Teenager

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sam is a good friend but maybe not a responsible citizen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back! 
> 
> As always, italics will be in single quotation marks.
> 
> Ex:  
> He peels a pink sticky-note from the inside cover of the file, turns it so I can see it. It reads, in bubbly cursive, ‘Be careful, Steve’.  
> OR  
> ‘He acted like he knew you’, whispers the quiet voice in the back of my mind, almost indistinguishable from my own thoughts.
> 
> This is serving as my distraction from the...everything going on right now. I hope it can be that for someone else, too. With that in mind,
> 
> Onward!

[Sam Wilson POV]

Sam watches as Steve brushes his knuckles over the kid’s brow, his usually stern countenance softened into a care Sam has learned to recognize. It is tender, the look on Steve’s face, paternal and a little sad. Sam knows that once this look appears, there is no argument he can make, no sense to which he can appeal, no loyalty he can name which has a chance of breaking through the apparently fragile affection nursed in the quiet furrow of his friend’s brow. 

“We can’t take him to the authorities, FBI, local cops, whatever,” Steve says. “They won’t know what to do with him.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D still exists,” Sam replies, even though he knows Steve won’t – or can’t – listen. “They’re better suited to this type of problem. We can run through our list of contacts, find someone trustworthy to sort all this out.”

Steve’s jaw tightens. “No. They’re going to see a threat, or an opportunity, not a person.”

“We have no idea who this kid is, Steve.”

“We don’t have to know,” Steve says. “That’s not the point.”

Sam sighs. The kid lies spreadeagled in the snow, and Sam recalls all the stuff his dad used to say about angels. ‘They aren’t pretty’, he said. ‘They’re strange, not like us at all, which is why when they come to us, the first thing they have to say is: Do not be afraid.’ Without the insolent sneer in his mouth or the frightened dart of his eyes, the kid looks a little less monstrous and a little more angelic, the sort of angelic his dad used to talk about – frightening, otherworldly.

And Sam doesn’t want to hand this kid off, not really. He doesn’t trust these government organizations or these corporations any more than Steve does. He’s just cold, and tired of this sort of trouble.

“All right,” he says. “I’ve got a plan.”

The plan itself is simple and effective. Steve picks up the kid and carries him back to the truck, depositing him in the middle seat while Sam meets Marcus coming back through the front gate.

“I don’t want any trouble,” is the first thing he says upon seeing Sam.

“I know,” Sam says. 

He gets this a lot. People like to get out of his way, an edge to his gait and a look on his face which isn’t mean so much as it is efficient. The effect isn’t on purpose, it just happens, and Sam doesn’t mind. It keeps mouths shut and curbs potential problems, which is what he needs right now. 

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he tells Marcus. “It’s going to be quick, easy, painless. All you have to do is follow directions. Got it?”

Marcus nods eagerly.

“Does this place have security cameras?” When Marcus says yes, four, and confirms their locations at the front booth and at the other three corners of the lot, Sam has Marcus show him, standing over his shoulder in the cramped booth as Marcus sits on the broken swivel chair and scrubs through the footage.

The kid doesn’t appear on camera until he darts into frame of the back-right camera and catapults himself over the fence, Steve appearing less than a second later. The same camera catches only an edge of the ensuing confrontation, the scuffle blurred and grainy in the upper part of the screen, and then proceeds to capture the totality of the last few minutes, from the baseball bat to the tranquilizer to the kid sprawled in the snow, Steve kneeling beside him.

“Erase it,” Sam says.

Marcus hesitates. “I…can’t. My boss will want to know…”

“Is this your Red Bull?” Sam interjects, picking up the half-full can sitting next to the keyboard. He bowls over the blustering response. “Sure would be a shame if it spilled all over this fancy equipment.”

It isn’t fancy. It is clunky, beige, and from the nineties. 

“Don’t, please, Mr. Falcon, I’ll be fired, I’m on thin ice already, this guy doesn’t like me…” Marcus continues to prattle, and Sam tunes him out, doing a once-over of the equipment. It’s so old the footage would be almost impossible to alter with any level of finesse, either in-person or remotely, managing the neat trick of being both obsolete and impenetrable.

“I hear you,” he says, interrupting Marcus mid-word. “I do. Here are you options, all right? Listen close because I’m not repeating myself. Option A: you erase this footage like I asked and say someone made you do it. I’ll tie you up to make this plausible. I don’t care what you say happened. Crackheads, teenagers, big guys with guns, whatever. Make up a story and stick to it. Foolproof, airtight. Number of people, age, gender, what they did and when they did it, make it consistent. And be smart about the race you pick or we’re going to have issues, you understand? You’ll have until someone finds you to come up with it.”

Marcus starts to speak again but a friendly pat on the shoulder from Sam stops him.

“For your trouble, you’ll find twelve-hundred dollars cash in an unmarked envelope in your mailbox,” he continues, “And a signed comic book from yours truly for your little nephew. Tell him he won a contest. He’ll be over the moon. Now, this option, Option A, is the fun option. Option B has significantly less fun, you get my drift? Either way, this footage is going to be erased.” Sam leans closer over Marcus’s shoulder, speaking directly in the man’s ear, his voice low, firm, and aggressively cheerful. “And if you’re thinking Option B leaves you room to snitch, I’d consider who exactly will believe that the Falcon and Captain freaking America broke into this random-ass rundown impound lot and stole a random-ass rundown truck that isn’t registered to either me, my friend, or anyone who’s ever loved or known us.” He straightens, catching the almost imperceptible tremble in Marcus’s meaty hands. “What’ll it be?”

Marcus swallows hard. “I think you know.”

“I need to hear you say it, Marcus.”

The man closes his eyes, pulse trembling like a trapped butterfly under his skin. “Please don’t hurt me.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Marcus. I’m not in the business of hurting people for fun,” Sam says. “Now, tell me whether you picked Option A or Option B.”

“Option A.”

“Excellent choice.” 

In a few minutes, Marcus is tied up in the derelict swivel chair, the footage is erased, and Sam signals Steve, who pulls up to the gate, rolling down the truck’s window.

“We all set?” he calls.

Sam flashes a thumbs up, flipping through Marcus’s wallet. He finds two dogeared photographs, the first of Marcus with his arm over the shoulders of a pretty snub-nosed woman. She has a megawatt smile, and both she and Marcus have a glow to them that can only be translated as ‘in-love-and-outrageously-happy’. The second photo is of a little boy sitting in the lap of a woman who looks a lot like Marcus, a picture book spread over both their knees. The boy has on a tiny pair of plastic Falcon wings, swimming googles pushed up into his curly hair. On the back in blue sharpie it reads, ‘Ty and Sasha’. 

He takes the money and the two worn credit cards out of the wallet, snapping a picture of the driver’s license while Marcus watches, his own handkerchief stuffed in his mouth.

“I’ll get these back to you,” Sam tells him, tapping the cash and cards against his palm. “If I hear you’ve kept up your end of the bargain, you’ll find the money and the comic book in your mailbox.”

Marcus grunts, the glint in his dark eyes both helpless and mutinous.

“Remember, you do your part and there’s no more trouble,” Sam warns over his shoulder, hopping out of the booth and jogging over to the truck. He has to nudge the boy in order to slide into the passenger seat, and when he slams the door, the boy slumps onto his shoulder, snoring lightly.

“We’re all set,” he says. “Drive a few blocks and drop me off.”

“What’re you thinking?” Steve asks, glancing over at him.

Sam remains silent for a moment. “One of us has to catch that flight tomorrow morning, or there will be too many questions.”

“I agree,” Steve says. “I’ll find a place to lay low, get in contact with Nat, see what she can find on our mystery guest, and go from there.” 

“Let me know where you end up. I’ll drop the box off to you.”

“There’s no way you’ll be able to track that down before morning,” Steve protests. “It’s fine, Sam. I mean it. It’s my fault it’s gone in the first place.”

“Let me know,” Sam repeats. “Right here’s good.”

Steve pulls up to the curb. The street is well lit, a gas station, a pub, and a strip club all open on this stretch. Sam nudges the kid off of him and gets out, already part of the way through dialing a phone number. 

“Call me,” Steve says, “The prepaid number.”

“You got it.” The car door slams and Steve drives away, the taillights retreating into the gloom. On the other end of the line, Ed picks up.

“Hey, I know it’s late,” Sam starts. 

“It’s cool,” Ed says, voice groggy, “What’d you need, Sammy? The bar lead pan out?”

“Unfortunately, no. I need something a little different,” Sam says. “You got info on a Leeman Brothers Towing Service and a Carlsbad Impound Lot? I need employee records if you can get them.”

“Sure. Give me a minute.” There’s a shuffling sound, most likely Ed getting out of bed and flipping on a light. Computer keys start tapping in the background. “Leeman Brothers, you said?”

“Yup. Anyone working the shifts from around 7 pm to now.”

“I’ve got a Cody Allenby, at 555 Gerrard Way, and a Scooter Carraway, 324 Hutchins Ave, Apartment 4E for Leeman Brothers. You got a geographic area you’re looking at?”

“Yeah, within a reasonable radius around that bar your friend gave me.”

“Got it. That’ll be Scooter, then. And for the impound lot, you’ve got Terrence Mayhew 663 Bluebird Drive and Marcus Lopez 596 Cyrus Court working security tonight,” Ed says.

“Any of them got a criminal record?”

“Lopez has a couple speeding tickets, and Scooter had a DUI roughly thirty years ago.”

Sam rubs at the headache starting between his eyebrows. That doesn’t narrow anything down, at all. “Thanks, Ed. I appreciate it.” He has to gear himself up to ask his next question. “Hey, would you be willing to drop something off for me later today? I’ll get it to you before I leave town.”

“It going to get me in trouble?”

Sam ignores the quiet guilt building in his chest. “Not if you’re careful.”

“Yeah, sure,” Ed says at last. “Whatever you need.”

Sam rubs a hand over the back of his head, wishing he had anything else to add. “Thank you. Thanks. Sorry for waking you.”

“No problem,” Ed says. There’s a slight hesitation on his end of the line, but then he hangs up with a click.

Sam wonders if he should’ve said something else, but there’s not much left to say that hasn’t already been said. He and Ed figured out all their shit years ago. It should be telling, Sam muses, that the least complicated relationship in his life might be with his dead wingman’s little brother. 

He checks the time and pulls a hand over his face. He has seven hours to find the box, deliver it to Steve, get the money, drop it and the signed comic book off to Ed, and make his flight. If everything goes smoothly, he’ll have plenty of time, but things so rarely goes smoothly these days.

“Get it together,” he murmurs to himself, taking a fortifying breath before he calls an Uber.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> K, next chapter incoming.
> 
> See you soon.
> 
> -Iz


	8. All-American WW2 Super-Soldiers Can Also Ghost You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bucky gets sad while social distancing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey!
> 
> As usual, single quotation marks stand-in for italics. As in...  
> Ex:  
> “‘We?’” I interject, grinning at him. “I thought ‘you’ wanted to help me.”  
> OR  
> ‘You’re smarter than this’, the voice in my head murmurs. And I am. I am smarter.
> 
> Etc. Etc. Moving on.

[Bucky Barnes POV]

Bucky hates being by himself in the tiny New York apartment. 

He has spent the last seventy-two hours in an endless cycle of three different activities, each futile in their own way. 

First: scrolling through last week’s meeting notes and status reports forwarded to him by Wanda, a pastime which yields up no new facts or insights and serves the double purpose of making him freshly miserable. 

Second: checking his inbox and messages only for his phone to cheerfully declare that, just like last time, there are 0 new notifications. 

Third: throwing Sam’s darts not at the dartboard but at an ad for the new Stark Industries campaign featuring Tony’s smug face, which Bucky has stolen from the nearest bus stop.

The continual abuse-by-dart caused the ad to rip and fall off the wall where Bucky pinned it, so he has replaced this last activity with staring mindlessly at the ceiling and/or pilfering the whiskey Sam’s been saving, since he ran through his own stash a day before. 

Then, at around midnight, his phone pings.

Still buzzed from the siphoned whiskey, he heaves himself up from the couch and goes over to the kitchen counter, where his phone – at less than 1% from all the checking and also from being beaten by fourteen-year-olds at Among Us – has changed its tune to display 1 new notification, an email from Natasha. He knows it’s her because it’s been marked as spam, from an address which has been sending him non-stop ‘which Avenger villain are you?’ type personality quizzes and ads for hot war criminal singles in his area which consist only of bad stock photos of Steve. This email is marked as urgent, the subject line reading ‘Uncle Sam needs YOU’. When he clicks on it, the message says, ‘hey sent u an invite go look at it. hurry etc. time sensitive.’ 

He hunts up his laptop and returns to the living room, where he cracks it open on the coffee table and proceeds to track down the encrypted invite Natasha has left for him. 

It leads him to what is, for all intents and purposes, a google-docs style file sharing tool, albeit a little more dark-webby and under the radar. He has used it before to help Natasha compile intel reports ahead of different missions, valuable mostly for being undetectable to Tony and other organizations that might not take to kindly to being spied on and/or hacked.

Right now, all that has been dropped in the doc is a link to a Wikipedia page. He clicks on it and it takes him to an encyclopedic entry on a serial killer from the 80s. Confused, he returns to the doc and clicks on a message that has been sent to the chat five seconds ago.

‘that was quick’, sent from user Sneaky Spider, aka Natasha.

Bucky types back, ‘what is this’ and hits send.

The typing bubble pops up, goes away, and pops up again about three times before she finally replies.

‘project for Steve’. A few seconds later, ‘they found something in detroit. want intel on it pronto. has to do with Harry’s brother, our least favorite green thumbs, & this guy.’ ‘Harry’ is the code name they use for Hydra and anything Hydra related. ‘Green thumbs’ refers to a shady environmental rights group they’ve been monitoring. ‘This guy’ references a picture which now pops into the chat, a blurry close-up headshot of a pale face. The person in it appears to be either asleep or dead.

Bucky makes the connection. ‘You’re not telling me that’s the same guy’.

‘as from the article?’ she responds, ‘yeah that’s exactly what I’m telling you. Steve sent it to me like 10 mins ago.’

In a few minutes, she has communicated what she knows via the chat. This boils down to Steve and Sam stumbling upon an enhanced teenager a few blocks away from the Mercury lab they visited earlier in the day, a lab which experienced what news reports are calling a gas-line explosion an hour or so after they left a meeting with a senior VP.

Steve thinks the teenager was being held at the facility in question and escaped in the chaos which followed. He’s asked Natasha to come up with any other relevant information regarding the explosion, what caused it, and the identity of the kid. He wants it by morning, which explains Natasha’s appeal for aid. 

‘so the random kid Steve picked up is a murderer’ Bucky clarifies, like it will change the facts which Nat has just relayed.

‘we’re all murderers bub the kid’s not special’ she says.

‘cold-blooded murderer’ he amends.

‘yea that’s still like half of us.’

He sighs and gives up, saying instead, ‘This happened in the 80s, right? If he’s still the same age, then that means Harry’s brother had him on ice.’

‘like Harry did you’ she adds unnecessarily.

He stares at this message for a long time, hands clasped so tight together in his lap his knuckles go white. A dull uneasiness aches in his gut, and he can’t pinpoint exactly what awakens it.

Before he can respond to Natasha, another message pops into the chat from a new user, Deadly Dartfrog, which has to be Sharon, the only other person Natasha would ask to sneak around under Tony’s nose.

‘I’ve put together a rough timeline. Adding it now. BTW, I’ve set up a drop with Steve.’

A moment later, the promised timeline pops into the doc, a series of news articles and police reports and audio clips and video links and other hyper-classified, top-secret intel. Bucky doesn’t really see any of it, the screen blurring out of focus. He has fixated on what Nat said, comparing him to the kid, and he knows he’s not going to be able to think about anything else until he talks to Steve about it.

But Steve isn’t talking to him right now. 

So he calls Sam instead, migrating from the living room to the kitchen while he listens to the phone ring, like distance from this revelation will mute it or dilute it even a little. The call goes to voicemail, and Bucky hangs up and dials again, not even fully aware of what he’s doing, just knowing he needs to talk to someone, anyone, who might get through to Steve, who might understand.

Nat will just laugh at him. He and Sharon have never been close. Tony has succeeded in keeping everyone else at arm’s length from him, leaving him isolated and lonely. 

In moments like this one, when he’s standing alone in the chill of an empty apartment, the only light the blue glow from a screen, he can’t blame Tony for this choice, however vindictive or illogical that choice might appear to be.

In moments like this one, Bucky can’t justify his own presence, can barely convince himself that the beat of his heart is real, that the breath in his lungs means anything at all. In fact, the more he tries to convince himself of the truth of his body, of the plain fact that he occupies space, the less right his body and the space it takes up feels. He should be invisible. Better yet, he shouldn’t be here at all.  
Steve has sat with him through these existential dizzy spells, grounded him with a cup of coffee or a walk through the city streets. ‘It’s the time displacement talking,’ Steve would say, ‘You just haven’t reckoned with it fully. The only way to cure it is to remind yourself that the world is good, and you can touch it.’ Those words meant something, but what meant more was the steady, ever-present conviction of Steve being there, of a warm body sitting on the couch beside him, a quiet and unadorned care.

Steve isn’t here, though, and hasn’t been here for a long time. Bucky has been wracking his brain for months trying to figure out ‘why’. He has made a misstep somewhere along the way, he’s sure of it, but his sins, usually so clear, are less evident now, when he most needs to identify them.

Finally, after again being sent to voicemail, Sam picks up.

“I’m kind of busy, Buck. What is it?” His voice is strained and hushed.

“Where are you?” Bucky asks. “Is Steve with you?”

Sam hesitates for a beat. “No. Are you all right?”

Bucky doesn’t know how he sounds. If there is fear in his voice, he’s lost the ability to school it. “Where is Steve?”

“Natasha told you, didn’t she?” Sam says grimly. “I ‘told’ her to leave you out of this until I got back.”

“Why didn’t you want her to say anything to me?”

Sam sighs. “‘I’ didn’t…never mind. Hold for a second, would you?”

On the other end of the line, Bucky hears a staticky thud and then the sharp crash of breaking glass. Sam curses and there’s an electric zap followed by a heavier thud. A second later, Sam gets back on the phone.

“I am not getting in the middle of this lover’s quarrel the two of you have going on,” he says, a little out of breath. “I mean it. You can talk to each other if you really want to resolve this.”

“Do you think,” Bucky says sourly, “That I would’ve called you if I thought there was the slightest chance Steve would pick up the phone?”

“Ouch, man.” A shuffling sound punctuates this, probably Sam pinning his phone between his ear and his shoulder. “I’m sorry about that, but if he’s going to be an ass about this, it’s on him. I’m not getting caught in any crossfire if I can help it.” Bucky hears the distinct sound of an unconscious human body being dragged over a carpeted floor.

“He’s by himself isn’t he?” Bucky asks, ignoring this. “He’s with a Mercury asset all by himself.”

“Don’t make it sound like I’m a negligent babysitter,” Sam retorts, grunting as he dead-lifts the weight he’s carrying over an obstacle. “Steve is a grown man. He can take care of himself.”

“He’s not thinking clearly.”

“What makes you say that?” Sam asks, voice garbled as he tears open a package of some sort with his teeth. 

Bucky can’t explain himself, can’t make Sam understand. “It’s obvious. He’s playing the white knight, rescuing someone he believes needs his help. He doesn’t know how to do anything else.”

“Oh, and you’ve been the damsel before, and that’s how you know.”

This implies that Bucky is paranoid and self-obsessed. “I am ‘not’ a damsel. I just mean…”

But he can’t say what he means. He can’t say that he’s the mistake Steve keeps making, even when it isn’t him Steve’s trying to save, even when it’s a substitute, a stand-in.

“I don’t like any of this either,” Sam says, breaking the silence, “But I can’t make Steve do anything he doesn’t want to do any more than you can.”

This is true, and Bucky, resentfully, knows it. 

“What’re you doing over there, anyway?” he asks, changing the subject.

“You know,” Sam says with a would-be casual air, “Just zip-tying an elderly tow-truck driver and leaving him in his own bathtub.”

“For fun, or…?”

Sam, always a piss poor liar, hedges. “I’m not exactly in the position to give a detailed status report. I’ll fill you in tomorrow morning.”

“You’re coming back?”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” he says. “Someone has to show up to that meeting.”

“Tony is going to see right through you.”

“You think I don’t know that? I know that,” Sam snaps. “I don’t need him to believe me. I just need to buy time while he tries to figure out what it is I’m lying about.”

“Sam,” Bucky says. “The kid the two of you rescued is a literal serial killer. You’re risking all of this, all the work we’ve done over the last two years, for a guy nicknamed the Bedford Butcher. That doesn’t raise any red flags for you?” 

“Yeah, I know who he is, Nat texted me as soon as she figured it out,” Sam says. “Look, none of us are angels here, and like I said, this is Steve’s judgment call.”

“It’s a bad one,” Bucky mutters.

“You think I like this? You think I like running around in the middle of the night, breaking into civilian homes, blackmailing innocent bystanders?” Sam shoots back. “I made a decision a while ago that I would have Steve’s back, no matter what that required. He hasn’t let me down yet.”

Bucky can’t counter this. Sam has always seen Steve as the quintessential do-gooder, clear-headed and strong-willed, a human moral compass. It might not ever occur to Sam that Steve can make a mistake or a poor judgment call. Sam isn’t a yes-man, he pushes back when he feels he has to do so, but Steve ‘is’ Captain America to Sam. He hasn’t ever been anything else.

But Bucky knows exactly where the recklessness of Steve’s stubborn bravado can lead. He knows the self-destructive tendencies into which Steve can devolve if he feels he’s failed or like he isn’t good enough. He knows the burden Steve yokes to himself. Even if he doesn’t say so, Steve blames himself for every person who gets hurt on what he perceives as his watch, every person he doesn’t manage to save, even if the hurt is inevitable or natural or necessary.

“You still there?” Sam asks.

“Yeah. I am,” Bucky says quietly. “I’ll meet you at LaGuardia around eight then, all right?”

“You don’t need to pick me up.”

“I kinda do,” Bucky says roughly. “I’ve been looking forward to getting out of this damn apartment since you left. You can’t take this from me.”

Sam lets himself laugh. “Fine. And Buck…we’ll figure it out. All of it. We always do.”

“Bye, Sam. I’ll see you.” 

Bucky hangs up and walks to the window that looks out at Queens, the sound of the city an omnipresent undertow. 

If Steve were here, or if he would just answer the fucking phone, Bucky could ask why he hasn’t been able to look him in the face or act like a real human being whenever Bucky enters a room. But then again, the whole point of this is that Steve isn’t here. Doesn’t want to be here. Will manage to find any and all possible disasters or distractions in order to stay away.

Bucky doesn’t really need to ask Steve anything. He can pinpoint the exact moment it all fell apart, back to the afternoon the building collapsed beneath the two of them, to what happened after the dust settled and they made it out alive.

He doesn’t know whether Steve can admit what went wrong, and why, though, things which only Steve could know, and which Bucky has been hopelessly trying to figure out for months now. 

“It was the right thing,” he says to himself. “I know it was the right thing.”

But talking to himself is depressing. At least with Sam back, he won’t be left staring at the walls. He has tried so hard these last few years, and now he feels as if he spent all that time throwing his labor, his dignity, his faith, down a fucking black hole. He’s tired of being the family secret, the name no one will say so that the tenuous peace may be kept. Tony will never let him into the fold, especially not now, and what stings the most is not so much the inevitable rejection but the fact that Bucky never really cared.

He doesn’t need to be a card-carrying member of an elite organization. He doesn’t need to rub elbows with presidents or CEOs or celebrities. He would be infinitely more content wandering between the farmer’s market and the library, reading alone in dive bars, ordering Thai food late at night from the place around the corner. That’s the kind of life he wants, empty of fanfare or the push-pull of a thousand different powerful people’s inscrutable motives. He thought Steve would want that, too. He thought that’s what they would be doing after they got pardoned and were finally able to come back home.

He thought wrong. 

That sort of life can only exist if Steve can confess the cornerstone of it, the truth the two of them have been side-stepping since they were kids. Bucky got tired of the charade, got tired of the waiting and the make believe and the aching denial.

It took him almost dying to tell the truth, but even then Steve couldn’t bear to face it, still can’t bear to face it. The potential reasons why are insidious and ugly, so at odds with who Steve is that Bucky would rather blame himself, put himself at fault for speaking too soon, for fucking all of this up.

And still, he can’t manage to keep his distance, to stop pushing, to leave well enough alone. Instead he keeps making a fool of himself. He keeps getting drunk and sad and lonely. He keeps calling even when no one answers, keeps leaving voicemails, and text messages, not just with Steve but with anyone who might possibly get through to him. Far more sober now, he feels embarrassed by the emotive sloppiness of this choice, but he can’t take it back. 

Not that it matters, anyway. 

He leans his forehead against the cool glass and closes his eyes. Tomorrow, he will wake up to the same cold quiet dark in the apartment. He will stop and pick up coffee, battle the New York traffic to and from the airport. He will make eggs or maybe soup while Sam sleeps, and then he will mope and overthink while Sam goes to meet Tony.

Meanwhile, Steve will be several states away, neck deep in a conspiracy that doesn’t involve him, risking his life and his fragile reputation for a cheap replica of Bucky himself.

Bucky knows he should be angry, that he has a right to that anger, but he can’t manage it.

He’s tired. He can’t find the fucking point of any of this. And, despite his best judgment, he misses Steve. He just misses him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right, guess I'll see you next week, when we'll hopefully know what is going to happen in the good ol' United States of America! (I say this with only a smidge of facetiousness.)
> 
> I don't like it here. I am very anxious. BUT at least I get to distract myself with fanfic, right? 
> 
> God, I'm nervous.
> 
> Anyway. I'm going to go write a few more chapters in hopes I can stave off all the existential dread, maybe read some fluff. It's been nice knowing you.
> 
> -Iz


	9. The Superiority of Green Bananas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sharon calls Steve out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey it's Thursday!
> 
> Single quotation marks=italics. I'm not including examples this time because I don't have the energy to copy/paste. :)
> 
> Lesbians enter the chat today so that's fun.
> 
> Anyway. Let's get to it.

[Sharon Carter POV]

Sharon finds Steve standing in the produce section of the grocery store, contemplating the selection of bananas. He doesn’t look up as she sidles next to him, nor flinch when she slips the USB drive into his pocket.

“They’re a bit green,” she says.

“They are,” he replies, “But I like them better that way.”

“No accounting for taste.”

The file in her jacket pocket ends up in his jacket pocket, the exchange imperceptible to all security cameras and other shoppers. 

She hesitates and then says, “Tell me you know what you’re doing.”

Steve’s expression remains benign. “About the bananas?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Depends,” Steve says. “Should I be worried?”

“Don’t get cocky,” she tells him. “If you’re not careful, you’ll end up in over your head.”

Steve glances around for anyone who could overhear them. The closest person is a store employee on their phone behind the deli counter. Even so, she lowers her voice.

“You made an impulsive choice,” she says quietly. “Don’t argue with me, you know that you did. And I know that’s what you do, but eventually that was bound to have consequences even you can’t fix. This is bad. Not our normal good-and-evil black-and-white bad, but grayscale bad. Complicated bad. Can’t see the bottom open water bad. ‘Hydra’ bad, Steve, in a way we haven’t seen since…”

But she doesn’t say Bucky’s name because Steve’s expression has closed. He selects a bunch of half-green bananas. “I’m assuming this means you found out who he is.”

He means the kid he and Sam picked up last night.

“We did,” Sharon says. “But I’m more concerned with what we couldn’t find.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he says. “We always do.”

“Sure.” Sharon doesn’t voice the uneasiness prickling down her spine. She has solved plenty of complicated problems in her time, and so has he, problems that seemed impossible at first.

The difference with this is that it feels less alien, less grandiose, less about the powers that be and much more about humans and their tendency to make stupid, human choices based in desperation and loneliness and greed, no matter who they were or how much power they had. In her experience, it was the human problems that always resisted solution. You could hurl a nuke at an alien invasion, but that sort of tactic was less effective when it came to the human heart.

“Anything else?” Steve asks. “I’ve got a sort of pressing problem waiting for me back at base.”

“You left him at the motel?” Sharon asks with disbelief.

“I secured the room, he isn’t going anywhere,” Steve says comfortably. “Besides, the tranquilizer we used has successfully knocked Bruce out for twelve hours, which is about two hours more than I’ll actually need. It’ll more than do the job on a scrawny teenager.”

She looks at him, his tone far too cavalier for her comfort. “Please tell me you’re taking this seriously, Steve. This is a Hydra affiliate asset we’re talking about here. We don’t know anything about his abilities, his endurance, his intentions. None of it.”

“Maybe this isn’t the best place to have this discussion,” Steve says, in a would-be cheerful voice. “And you weren’t there last night. He’s not a trained assassin, Shar. He’s a kid. He’s scared.”

“He is not a ‘puppy’, Steve,” Sharon exclaims, forcing herself to stay reasonable despite a rising tide of incredulity. “Can you even hear yourself right now? Tell me you at least restrained him.”

“I don’t think you heard me,” Steve returns, in his insufferably tranquil way, “He is a ‘child’. I would no more tie him up then I’d tie up Peter.”

“Don’t condescend to me,” Sharon retorts in a clear, unamused voice. “This isn’t Peter. This boy isn’t naïve. He isn’t lost. All reliable indicators suggest he is ‘not’ capable of remorse or pity, but it is borderline plain fact that he ‘is’ capable of incredible violence, and that was before whatever Mercury did to him. This scenario isn’t just a distraction from your domestic problems, all right? You’ve gotten yourself – and us – into some seriously deep shit. I ‘told’ you I didn’t want to be involved in anything else like this.”

“I get your meaning,” Steve says evenly. “And I’m treating this whole situation with the seriousness it demands, just like I’ve always done. I know what I’m risking, and I know what I’m asking of you, and rest assured I’m not taking any of it for granted. Now. Is there anything else?”

She knows she shouldn’t say it, but she is fed up with him and his ridiculous high horse, so she says it anyway. “Yeah, actually. Call Bucky.”

“How…?” his attention snaps abruptly back to her, a hint of panic or hope edging his voice.

“He called me Tuesday night, smashed, wanting to talk to you. He doesn’t even like me that much. Do you know how drunk he’d have to be to call me?”

Steve doesn’t say anything, the impassive mask snapped back over his face.

“You’re being a dick to him, Steve, and he doesn’t deserve it. So call him when you’ve got a minute,” she says, touching his arm.

Steve pulls away, the movement so subtle only a spy could tell it was on purpose. 

“How about this,” he says, “I’ll call Buck when you talk to Nat.”

Sharon ignores the pang she feels in her chest. “Fair enough,” she says, keeping her voice pleasant and professional. “Good luck with all of this.”

“Thanks, Sharon,” he says, warmth and a little guilt back in his voice.

“Anytime,” she says, and goes to pay for the sixpack of beer she picked up as cover. When she leaves, the produce section in front of the exit is empty, Steve long gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> K, next chapter is incoming etcetera. 
> 
> -Iz


	10. The Logistical Problem of Escaping a Mercilessly Open-Hearted Hero

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emmett divulges his origins and a ~mysterious stranger~ arrives

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is this week's second chapter, as promised. 
> 
> Single quotation marks = italics. 
> 
> I think that's it? 
> 
> Onward, etcetera.

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]:

I come to in a bed that isn’t mine. The pillow smells like cheap cologne and cheap sweat. I can hear the shower running in the nearby bathroom. A headache lingers in the back of my skull and a chink of sunlight escapes through the curtains, hits the scarab-blue beer bottle sitting on the nightstand in front of my face, refracting a chunk of jewel-colored light onto the off-white wall, a diamond of bright blue backlit by a rainbow. This is the first thing I see when I open my eyes. It is almost beautiful. 

I come to groggy and confused, my left side stiff from lying on the wood floor for who knows how long. The first thing I notice is that I’m starving. Hunger is not a foreign feeling, the pang of it almost comforting in its familiarity. I feel sick as I push myself upright, nauseous even, the hunger in my stomach an achy, empty wind. The air is hot and close, steam pressed under a pot lid. Sweat coats the back of my neck, slick and unpleasant in the usual places, the backs of my knees, my armpits, sticking my t-shirt to my stomach and my shoulders. I look around and see the dirt and dead leaves strewn in the fireplace, the crumbled ash caked black in its seams. I see Sarah Marshall, a small woman who looks smaller in the middle of the empty room. When I turn my head, I see the bright red rubber soles of Toby Shaw’s sneakers, his jeans hitched up over his pale ankle. After that I note the blood, and the peculiarities of the smell, and the state of my own body, and the flutter of a pulse in Sarah Marshall’s jaw. I learn later that someone stabbed the two of them a total of twenty-one times, the majority of the displayed rage reserved for Toby. This should be overkill, but at the point I wake up in that abandoned house’s living room, Sarah isn’t dead yet.

I come to in a quiet cell, early in the morning. The color of the sky is muted through the narrow, high-up window. I can hear a single bird singing. The air is damp and chilly, and I turn on my side, still half-asleep, tugging the standard-issue wool blanket with me, and pull my knees up to my chest. I don’t know if I’m trying to get warm again or if I’m just trying to make myself small. A fever damps my forehead, and I am far colder than I should be. I went to sleep the night before with a sharp pain in my right side which will turn into acute appendicitis. I don’t tell anyone about this until I am nearly dead. A guard will happen to notice and save my life, and later I will wonder if that act of protocol and would-be humanity kept that man up at night. A few nights after this I’ll fall back asleep in a hospital bed, the rough pillowcase against my cheek and the hole where my appendix used to be the last thing I’ll remember, dull and quietly miserable as everything else.

I come to in a cold metal coffin. I come to in the backseat of an ancient Ford truck.

I come to for real, face pressed into a lumpy pillow, whatever I’d been dreaming about lingering at the far edge of my mind like the last stubborn haze of a hangover. I’m in a cheap motel room with two queen beds made up with musty floral comforters. The curtains have been pulled closed, all light blocked except for the bright slant which slices across the dent in the pillow where my head had just rested. 

I’m still in the clothes I stole, except for the shoes, which I see sitting on the floor by the nightstand. I slip the shoes on before I stand up, vaguely grateful not to have to be in any closer contact with the carpet. Even in the dark, I can tell it hasn’t had a run-in with a wet vac since before I was born.

I hate motels. I saw a tv special once which went over rooms like this with a UV light, and found all sorts of unexplainable filth undetectable to the human eye. I don’t mind dirt I can see. Dirt I can’t see is a whole other matter. Brandan teased me for this, called me fussy, but in a jostling, good-natured way. This is what I dwell on as I make my way to the window and fling it open. Noonday light floods in and sears my corneas and I wait for my eyes to adjust. I wonder what happened to him after he disappeared. He’s probably middle-aged or dead by now. Lucky son of a bitch.

Outside the window is a dingy, mostly empty parking lot, beyond it the whiz of cars on a highway, and beyond that the distant cityscape on the horizon. The sky is bright winter blue, the fresh-fallen snow scraped into midsize drifts at the far end of the parking lot, icicles dripping from the edge of the sagging awning which overhangs the walkway.

Steve and Sam have gotten me out of the city. How kind of them. They’ve also left me unattended. How stupid of them. The moment I opened my eyes I could tell there was no one in the space with me. This comes from practice, a honed sixth sense that could be termed paranoia or a necessary survival skill depending on who you ask. I can also tell that no one occupies the rooms on either side of me, and this is less practice and more obviously ‘other’, tied up in whatever Mercury has done to me.

I go over and try the door. The locked doorknob rattles in my hand at the same time I hear a car pull into the parking lot. With my back to the window, I can picture exactly what the vehicle looks like. An old gold F150, the engine crochety but otherwise in good running condition. I also know that inside the car is Steve.

The truck pulls into a spot right in front of the room and parks. I flip the deadbolt into place and retreat to the bathroom, locking myself in. There’s a narrow window above the toilet, and it’ll be a tight squeeze, but I think I’ll fit. Outside, a car door slams and there’s a plastic rustle of grocery bags.

“How domestic,” I mutter to myself, climbing atop the tank and easing the screen out of the window. It has tiny metal clasps holding it in place, and I remove it and set it on the grimy tile floor with a minimum of noise and effort. The key jangles in the door and I hear Steve humming tunelessly to himself. The deadbolt halts his entrance, and the humming cuts out.

The window itself won’t jimmy open more than I crack. I strip off my coat and then my hoodie, wrapping the hoodie around my arm before I break it. It shatters in a cacophony of shards and glass. Outside the bathroom, the door to the room flies open with a bang. I sweep my arm over the narrow ledge, clearing off the remainder of the glass, and throw the hoodie out, shrugging on my coat before I lift myself through the opening, feet first, using the lip of the frame itself as leverage.

To his credit, Steve doesn’t bother with knocking, shouldering the flimsy bathroom door open in time to see me most of the way out the window, my head and shoulders the only parts of me still inside. Our gazes lock for less than a heartbeat, Steve’s expression a cocktail of grim adult surprise. 

“I wouldn’t,” he says in a warning tone.

“Whatever,” I say. “Thanks for the ride.”

Then I extricate myself fully from the window and drop to the ground, broken glass briefly snagging in my coat. Almost the second my feet hit the pavement, a high-pitched whine fills my head. It hurts like a bitch, a stabbing sensation that pierces between my eyes. I need to make it a few steps to get out of its radius, and then I’ll be fine, but I only make it one before Steve comes up behind me, clamping a hand on the back of my neck.

I hear a click and the sound recedes, an echo of it still ricocheting between my ears. 

“Let’s go back inside, huh?” Steve says. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

“I don’t want to,” I manage. He lifts me up by my collar, which is how I figure out I’ve dropped to my knees. 

“You’re still woozy from the tranquilizer,” he tells me, “And the side-effects of that noise you just heard will linger for a few more hours. You’re in no shape to mount any sort of decent offense, so one escape artist to another, I’d cooperate.”

“Fuck you,” I slur.

“Yeah, yeah. Noted.” He escorts me back to the motel room with little effort and sets me in a dining chair before he locks the door again.

“Let’s hope your little stunt didn’t alert anyone in the vicinity,” he comments, snapping the curtains shut.

“It didn’t.” He frowns at me and I add, “Trust me,” which doesn’t amuse him either. 

He picks up the bag of groceries from where he tossed them earlier and sets them on the table in front of me, taking a bottle of red Gatorade out and unscrewing the lid before he offers it to me.

“Here,” he says, “Drink this.”

I’m thirsty, so I take it. It occurs to me as I take a sip that I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since I came to in Mercury’s basement. He sits down across from me, rifling through the bag for a stick of jerky, which he peels and eats. The smell of salt and preservatives makes my stomach rumble. 

I watch him chew with a combination of annoyance and resentment. He has positioned himself between me and the door, artfully blocking my quickest exit. 

I don’t know what happens next.

I used to be able to predict with fair accuracy what the next hour or day or week would look like. Life reformed itself around any surprises, quickly becoming monotonous again.

With all the strange things locked inside me now, I have no idea. I know that Steve has a file in his front jacket pocket, but I don’t know the future.

“So,” Steve says, crumpling up the jerky wrapper, “We’re going to try this again.”

I stare down at my feet. He doesn’t know who I am. If he did, his voice would be different. His stance. The distance between us. He would be on the other side of the room if he knew.

“I’m Steve. You wanna tell me your name?”

“Emmett,” I mutter sullenly.

“Good to meet you, Emmett,” he says, every inch the well-meaning guidance counselor. He takes the file out of his jacket and opens it up. “I have friends who can get me almost anything, but they couldn’t find much on you.”

The file in his hands is about Mercury, about how and why I woke up. I don’t know the exact details until he starts telling me. My mind fills in each word a split second before he says it, creating an echo that hurts my already sore head.

I try and ignore the pain.

“Yesterday, as you know, a break-in occurred at a Mercury lab, located in midtown Detroit, a few blocks away from where we found you. My friends –” My head throbs and I get a vague image of a pretty, sharp-featured blonde woman “–were able to get past the cover story Mercury issued about a gas line rupturing. Mercury is in reality a subsidiary of an organization known as Hydra, and we’ve been trying to infiltrate them since we learned about their existence a few years ago, when Hydra fell apart. We haven’t been able to get anywhere close, which makes my friends especially curious as to who sabotaged the lab and why.”

He studies me, looking for a tell of some sort. I resist rubbing the aching spot between my eyes and take a swig of Gatorade. “It wasn’t me.”

“No,” Steve says after a second, turning back to his file, “It wasn’t. An environmental and animal rights group took credit for it. Earthlings United, they call themselves.”

The name is dumb, but I’m not going to say so.

“They issued a press release last night saying they did it because of Mercury’s inhumane testing practices,” he continues, “They never clarify what practices they’re referring to, exactly, though they don’t really have to. Mercury’s been under fire for years when it comes to their procedures for testing on both animals and people. There have been protests, petitions, they’ve even been sued a few times. Anyway, the most specific this statement gets is when it says, ‘As the snake swallows its own tail, so will Mercury devour itself. Earthlings United must do nothing but tear down the façade of this soulless institution, which it has now successfully done.’ Etcetera, etcetera, when you least expect it the blow shall come from within type stuff, and that’s basically it.”

I try not to squirm in place, focusing on setting the Gatorade bottle carefully on the table in front of me.

“The EU has proven just as difficult to break into as Mercury,” Steve adds, brow furrowing, “Which is a bit surprising, considering what we know about them.”

“Wow,” I say, “Fascinating. What’s this got to do with me? You think I’m one of these lab rats Mercury tested?”

“I know you are,” Steve says quietly. “There are people who spotted a strange individual fleeing the sight of the accident.”

He hands me a picture. It’s a blown-up still image from a grainy traffic cam, and it is me. I’m standing on a corner, hands in my pocket, only the white flash of the side of my face visible, but the outfit matches. 

I’d emerged in a sea of professionals, acting skittish, in clothes too expensive to logically belong to me. Even without getting a look at my face, I’m not surprised some nervous White lady reported me.

“It wasn’t hard to track you. You stand out. You know this,” Steve says. “You can’t hide. Mercury would’ve had you back within the day, if not sooner. The real question isn’t where you came from. The real question is, what happened to you?”

I look away.

“I don’t think you know the answer to that,” Steve continues in that same low, sympathetic tone. “But if you tell me what you do know, I can help fill in the blanks. From what I can tell, you’re a pretty clever guy, so my guess is you’re already aware what a tight position you’re in right now. Think about it. You don’t have many options, and if you’re going to get out of this in one piece, you need help. I can help you.”

“You said that last night when I was running away. Why,” I fling the picture back at him with as much force as I can muster, “Should I trust the motherfucker who chased me down, tranqed me, and is now holding me hostage in a shitty motel room? Would ‘you’ trust that guy?”

The picture hits him in the chest and he catches it, sets it absently back atop the sheaf of papers, straightening it so the edges all line up.

“Fair point,” he admits. “You said yesterday that everybody knows you. I’m familiar with that sensation, of waking up in a world of strangers, and everybody knows my name.”

“And who’re you supposed to be that you think you know what I feel?”

He looks at me then with a dark gaze that pierces my chest. It’s old, that gaze, and fierce, and knowing. I’ve never met anyone in my life who had a look like that.

“How old are you?” he asks instead of answering, “If you’d lived your years? Don’t bother lying to me, I can sense the time displacement on you.”

It’s like he pulls the answer out of me. “Forty-eight.”

“So you really have no idea who I am.”

“No. And you don’t recognize me.”

He ducks his head a little, pulling the file incrementally back toward himself. 

No, he doesn’t know me, but he could, if he flipped another page, dug a little farther. In the bowels of that file I sense the story they told about me back then, the kind of story kids whisper to each other after lights out, the kind grown-ups pass around and clutch to their chests. 

Everyone wants to remedy the complex and unknown with a simple answer, a monster they can banish back into the dark, so they tell a story, even if it isn’t true. 

I’m curious how Steve interprets stories like mine. He seems the sort of bleeding heart to believe in black and white, good and evil, noble knights and damsels in distress. 

“You first,” I say. “And are you going to share that jerky or are you just going to let me starve to death?”

His mouth presses into a thin line and he pushes the grocery bag to me. “Go ahead.”

“Thanks.” I root around and find three more sticks of jerky, a bag of Twizzlers, and a bunch of yellow-green bananas. I’m halfway through a stick of jerky before I realize I’m chewing.

“I’m Captain America.”

It takes me a moment to figure out what he means by that. He isn’t lying. “Like the comic books? The superhero? You’re dead. There’s a whole conspiracy theory about you.”

“The ice preserved my body,” Steve says, like he’s had to explain this at dinner parties a million times already. “You missed a lot when you were under. Aliens. Killer robots. A pandemic. It’s been a really strange few years.”

I cock an eyebrow. He’s telling the truth, but I told the truth, too, and no one believed me. Like the story Steve is feeding me now, the truth had been unbelievable. I don’t want to believe him, but it all fits. He almost caught up to me at the impound lot, stronger and faster than either of the other human beings there last night. It explains why he’s going after Mercury and how he was able to get information on them, and on me. 

“Fine,” I say. “Cool. If you’re Captain America, though, why did that guy recognize Sam first? Is he just more popular?”

Steve shifts in his chair, looking uncomfortable for the first time I’ve witnessed. “I’m not exactly beloved in the court of public opinion right now.”

“Really? Why?”

I catch a thought, so clear and concise it’s impossible to miss, or to mistake. Steve thinks of a small box tucked away in a dark that may be a glove box or a pants pocket or a dresser drawer, always close by and always out of sight.

“I don’t like Nazis,” Steve says coldly, “And evidently that’s a controversial position to hold these days.”

It’s a lie, and not a very good one, but I let it slide, more curious than anything else. Steve doesn’t know about my power of intuition, and if he isn’t on his guard, I might be able to learn more on this particular topic, which could potentially give me an angle. There’s no better currency than secrets, in my experience. 

“Speaking of Sam, why isn’t he here?” I say. The change of topic washes over Steve with a visible wave of relief. “He make that flight he was going on about?”

“Yes, he did,” Steve says. “And he sends his regards.”

I tear open a second stick of jerky. He waits, watching me chew, the troubled, ennobled furrow appearing back between his brows.

“He didn’t want me to do this,” Steve says. “He thought it was a bad idea.”

“Smart guy.”

“And my friend, the one who gave me this file, left me a note.” He peels a pink sticky-note from the inside cover of the file, turns it so I can see it. It reads, in bubbly cursive, ‘Be careful, Steve’. “Now, what do you make of that?”

“Sounds like common sense to me.”

He presses the post-it back to the front of the file. “I haven’t looked through this yet. I wanted to give you a chance to explain yourself before I hear what anyone else has to say.”

My pulse starts to race with little warning, heart banging against my ribs like a wild bird trapped in a cage. I desperately do not want to be here. Steve looks to me for an answer.

“I gave you my origin story,” he says. “It’s your turn.”

“No one told you?” I say dully. “I thought I was supposed to be famous.”

“Sam thought he might recognize you, but he couldn’t place from where,” Steve says. “My friend told me you’re not in any of our databases, but she did a reverse image search…”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“She looked for a match for your face against every image uploaded onto the internet,” Steve says. “After that, she told me it was child’s play. According to her, you are famous. You’re everywhere.”

I absorb this information and gesture at the file. “Can I see that?”

“Sure.” After only a beat of hesitation, he slides it over to me.

I can feel the weight of his gaze as I open it up. He wants a response – surprise, shock, resignation, anger – but I don’t have any of that. I don’t know why he’s sitting here with me, why he’s bothering with any of this at all. 

The file falls open in my hand and I see the neat compilation: just printed reports on top and then the older material near the bottom. I flip past the first few dozen pages, which detail the contours and origins of both Mercury and Earthlings United with anthropological care. Beneath this, I find what I’m searching for.

It’s a printout of a New York Times front page, dated the morning after my sentencing. The headline pronounces, ‘NO QUESTION OF GUILT’. Beneath it is my mugshot. In it, I hold my name in front of my chest, head lulled back in what could be callous apathy, my expression sallow and slack. I wore coveralls that day, and beneath the blue you can see the blood staining the collar of my t-shirt. I look straight through the camera. 

I skim the first sentence of the article. It starts ‘Seventeen-year-old Emmet Faust of Detroit, Michigan has been found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder’. I don’t make it any further. 

The next printout, an article from the Detroit Free Press, has a second handwritten note stuck to it. In the same buoyant handwriting, it reads, ‘Mercury?’ The headline above it blares, ‘TEEN KILLER ESCAPES HOSPITAL’. I regard this for a second, miserable satisfaction warming my gut. So this is what they think happened to me. To the public I’m a forty-nine-year-old fugitive lurking under the radar. I peel away the note to see the picture they used beneath it. 

I recognize it simply because I remember when it was taken. They’d been wheeling me into the hospital amidst the tumultuous rage of the crowd and the crush of reporters. The police barricade held them back, and I thought in the moment through a haze of delirium and pain medicine, how ironic it was, that the people who had caught me were now forced to keep me safe.

Then a photographer – James Ewing, the credit says – broke through somehow. I think they let him. He managed to get one shot before they pulled him away, and I remember the black eye of the camera and the flash like lightning searing my vision.

In the picture, I look as sick as I am, but my eyes are the same as in the mugshot. Even in black and white, they have the same effect. Haunted. Bright with delirium. Staring directly into and beyond the camera.

“Is something wrong?”

I shake my head without looking away from this image of myself. “Why didn’t you look through the whole thing earlier?”

“I told you,” Steve says, “I wanted to give you an option to explain yourself first. Even if I wanted to, I didn’t have time. I met my friend at the supermarket and came right back here. Why?”

I don’t answer at first, paging through an article from TIME, transcripts from television interviews with and spotlights about officers and lawyers and victims’ family members, ‘Where Are They Now?’ pieces from eight years ago, crime scene photos, police reports, and on and on. Whoever put this file together has done a decent job consolidating what must’ve been reams of information. 

“Did you friend say anything to you?”

His answer is tailored, even. “No. Like I said, there wasn’t much time. You think she should’ve?”

“It doesn’t matter, I guess.” I close the file, sticking the finger in to mark my spot before I turn it on the table so he can see, flipping it back open to the picture of my mugshot. “You want to know who I am? My name is Emmett Faust. They called me the Bedford Butcher. I was convicted on four counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison three times over. A year into my sentence my appendix ruptured, and they had to take me to the hospital. A man from Mercury came to see me there – he’s noted in the hospital log that your friend included – but it isn’t his real identity. I disappeared the next day. They must’ve come and taken me away.”

He looks from me down at the picture. Back to me. He doesn’t say anything, but the question is there on his face. I’m almost flattered. He isn’t sure if he believes it.

“How old did you say you were?”

“At the time of the first murders, I’d just turned seventeen.”

“So you’re a serial killer.”

Misery or shame coats the back of my throat, sour as bile. “The Washington Post article goes through the timeline. It’s just under the one you’re looking at.”

“All right.” He spares me a long, inquisitive look before he turns to the article and reads through it, expression stoic, gaze flicking efficiently through the entire article, the only noise the rasp when he flips the page. 

When he finishes, he sits back for a second, absorbing what he just learned. Then he pulls something from his pocket. I wince, remembering the device he used to make the sound, and his eyes flick to me and away, a troubled furrow in his brow.

“She gave me this, too,” he says, showing me a slim piece of orange plastic. “It’s an information storage device, like a floppy disc. This one holds recordings of your interrogation by the police, and a documentary she said would be helpful.”

“You knew I’d been arrested, then, and for something serious.”

He’s done a good job keeping this fact out of his head and off his face, only obvious to me now in hindsight.

“I have a habit of reserving judgement,” Steve says, turning the storage device between his fingers thoughtfully. “In my experience, people aren’t often given much of an option when it comes to what they do, and why. And those in power would rather punish them then get them the resources to make a better choice.”

“Sure. That makes sense if someone smokes weed or shoots their shitty husband,” I say, “Less so for serial murder.”

“Four people,” he repeats.

“Yeah. They tried to pin two others on me too, this elderly couple, but they couldn’t make it stick,” I say. “Didn’t matter, I guess. Prosecution had more than enough to charge me.”

“Did you do it?” This answer seems to matter to him.

“No,” I mutter. “I had an alibi for those ones, even if they didn’t like what it was. Doesn’t matter what I say about the others.”

“What did you say?”

I look at him directly. “I pled not guilty. They loved when I did that. Made me look like an arrogant, unremorseful dick.”

“So you’re telling me you’re innocent of all of it.”

“I think I’m innocent,” I correct. “If you look at the recording, I guess you’ll probably hear the part where I say I don’t remember the three hours the last two were supposedly killed in. So I guess I could’ve done it, and just not remember, but I don’t think I did. I swore it on my life back then. You can hear me blubbering about it on tape if you like.”

He tucks the storage device back in his pocket. “You’re being remarkably casual about this.”

“Would you be more convinced if I cried a little? Hyperventilated? I did all that shit already. You cry too hard and you’re a psychopath, you don’t cry at all, you’re still a psychopath,” I say, leaning back in my chair. “You’re going to believe what you’re going to believe no matter what. It doesn’t matter what I do.”

“You said you had an alibi for the first pair of murders, the ones they didn’t charge you with. What about the others?”

“I was a homeless pickpocket. My alibis weren’t exactly airtight.”

“But you had them.”

“Didn’t you just read about all this? I don’t see why you need me.”

Steve closes the file in answer. He doesn’t want to look at it anymore, I can sense it. I don’t want to sense it. 

“So Mercury kidnaps a convicted killer, experiments on him, and then puts him on ice? That doesn’t make sense,” he says.

“You’re forgetting a part,” I interrupt. “I was a ‘teenaged’ convicted killer. And you’ve been experimented on and preserved in ice yourself, evidently. It’s weird, but it’s not unreasonable.”

“And you don’t remember anything that was done to you?”

“No. I don’t,” I say testily.

I do not want to be here. I do not owe this man an explanation. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t owe anyone anything, and I resent the experience of being trapped in a small room while someone else tries to poke around my brain for their answers. I’ve done that already.

“What about where you were held?” he probes.

“It was…I don’t know. Like a place you store dead people,” I snap. “In the basement. Why does it matter?”

“Everything matters. We know very little about Mercury or its operations, and anything you can tell…”

“‘We?’” I interject, grinning at him. “I thought ‘you’ wanted to help me.” At the word ‘help’ he remains impassive, but I sense his unease simmering beneath the surface. “Yeah, not so eager anymore, are ‘we?’ I won’t say I told you so, but I did. Tell you so.”

“Emmett…”

The grin gets wider of his own accord. No one has called me by my given name since my grandma. The guards avoided it, like if they pretended I wasn’t a real person then I wouldn’t be. The lawyers and the judge and the witnesses all used my full name ‘Emmett-Faust’, and everyone else before that hadn’t ever known my real name, because I didn’t tell it to them.

“I’m not stupid,” I tell him. He thought he knew better; he thought he wouldn’t be like everyone else. He should’ve listened to me, but no one ever listens to me. “You’re going to milk me for everything I know and then you’re going to hand me over to whoever’s above you before I can do any more damage. A superhuman psychopath is the last thing you need.”

Steve crosses his arms, only a hint of worry in his posture. “It may interest you to know that you wouldn’t be the first superhuman psychopath I’ve dealt with.”

In my lap, my fingers have tightened into fists without my realizing it. I try to loosen them, to relax, but it’s like trying to straighten wire. ‘You can take him.’

I shake off the voice. I can’t take him. I know this, I’ve tried twice already. It’d be stupid to try again. If I’m going to get away, I need a different approach.

“Here’s how this is going to work, kid. I’m going to be honest. I don’t trust you,” Steve says, “But I’m going to pretend that I do.”

“Seems like a sound strategy to me.”

‘He knows you can take him. That’s why he’s scared of you.’ Again, I ignore the voice, stuffing my fists between my knees.

“In our legal system, you’re supposed to withhold judgement unless you can prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone committed a crime,” he says.

I snort. “What’re you, a civics textbook?”

“I’m trying to say that I don’t know if you did it,” Steve says. 

“Join the club.”

He wears that long-suffering mantle often donned by adults in authority. ‘Do you understand that this is serious?’ The tired, world-weary adult will ask this in a somber tone, maybe even grab your arm or your shoulder so you look them in the face. ‘Hey, look at me. This is not the time to joke around. You’re in big trouble.’ I can’t count how many times I’ve had social workers, or police officers, or other random adults say this to me, like I’m not equipped to understand the gravity of the situation.

Oh, yeah. I get it. And I know enough to understand that the situation will work itself out in spite of me, without my say, for better or for worse. The same is true now.

“Look,” I say, “I don’t give a shit whether you believe me or not and I’m not interested in trying to convince you one way or the other. You don’t have to tell me, it’s the big leagues, not fucking debate club. I do not care about Mercury. I do not care about random save-the-Earthers. I don’t care what they want with me or what you want with them, all right? I’m stuck here with you, you’ve made that ‘crystal’ fucking clear. If it makes you feel better to play hero, fine. If you would rather toss me to the curb, whatever. Either way, the only leverage ‘I’ve’ got is all this stuff you think I know. Maybe I know it, maybe I don’t, but if you want me to tell you, it’s going to take more than your giving me red Gatorade and the fucking benefit of the doubt.”

“You do understand that I’m your only option, don’t you?” Steve asks, unflustered by my outburst. “You can walk out the door right now, try your luck, I won’t stop you.”

“Like you didn’t stop me earlier?”

“I wanted you to know where I stood before you chose one way or the other.”

Before I can reply, I hear a car pull into the motel parking lot. It’s a small red four-door, a phlegmy throat-clear clogging the smooth run of the engine. It parks next to Steve’s truck. I can tell there’s three occupants, but I can only picture one. ‘The hunter’, I think to myself, my pulse quickening. 

They sit in the backseat, unmoving, and I cannot make out their face or their age or their build, but I know them. Not their name, or their identity, or their past. In all the usual ways, they’re a stranger to me, but I know them anyway. 

I stand up, the blood rushing in my head.

“You were followed.”

“No,” Steve says matter-of-factly, standing up, too. “They’re tracking you.”

“How?”

“If I knew that, they wouldn’t be here.”

He goes over to the window, lifting the corner of the curtain so he can see outside. “We need to go.”

I don’t argue with him. He’s on my side, for now, and it doesn’t matter why so long as he can get me out of here.

“They don’t look like Mercury.”

“What does Mercury fucking look like?” I demand.

He glances at me, taking in my panic. “Suits, usually, and bulletproof luxury sedans. You need to calm down.”

“I am calm.”

Outside, the person in the backseat shucks off their coat to reveal the bristle of a bulletproof vest. I hear the distinct ‘snick’ of a magazine release. 

“There’s only two in the room,” they say, their voice clinical and flat.

A reply comes from the front seat, but I can’t make out the voice, distorted as if it comes from underwater.

“It’s them,” the first voice returns casually, magazine snapping back into place. “Comms on. Sit tight. I’ll be back.” The car door opens. 

“I need to get out of here,” I say. “‘Right’ now.”

Steve backs away from the window. The motel room is tiny, composed of the two beds, a bedside table, the dresser that sits against the opposite wall, and the table at which we were just sitting. Besides that, there’s nothing – hangers in the closet, a crooked lamp, a broken coffee maker, a tiny tv.

The only ways out are the door, and the window in the bathroom.

“They can hear us,” I say, as Steve starts to speak, and I know this is true. A primal fear clamps the back of my neck and refuses to let go.

Steve doesn’t question this. 

“Leave the way you came,” he says. Outside, the car door slams shut. They know we know they’re coming, and they consider it irrelevant. “I’ll catch up to you. Here.”

He snags my coat sleeve without warning, pressing the smooth contours of a folded switchblade into my hand. I wrap my fingers around it, nonplussed, and he shakes his head in answer, a quiet determination intense in his eyes.

“Go.”

I take a step backwards. “He’s like me.”

“I said go.”

I do, in the bathroom and out the window, the process quick and automatic. Behind the motel it’s mostly crumbled concrete and yellow weeds, the snow piled along the chain link, a dumpster and the back of a 7/11 on the other side.

I hear the smudge of a footstep on the gritty roofing tiles and look up to see the hunter appear at the edge of the roof. They have a handgun aimed at me.

“Nice knife,” they say, and pulls the trigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...And we're done for the week! At least for this fic. Hope you enjoyed/See you next time. 
> 
> Sneak peek: More gay angst incoming. As a gay with lots of angst I am very excited. 
> 
> Whoo! I'm still not convinced reality is a thing but at least the election is over?
> 
> -Iz


	11. The Hunter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emmett comes face to face with his darker double

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey hey hey!
> 
> Here's the first chapter for the week! I'm very excited to introduce my second main original character, who's going to get more screen time later on. For now, let me dispense with the usual.
> 
> Single quotation marks indicate italics. I don't have the energy to find examples to copy-paste, so use your imagination, I guess.
> 
> See you on the flip side.
> 
> -Iz

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]

The bullet misses me, or I dodge it, and I hear the casing clink, spent, into the eaves. Before I can recover, before I can do anything, the hunter steps lightly off the roof and lands in front of me, raising the gun before firing twice more. The gun makes no sound when it goes off, the only proof it’s been fired the whiz of the bullets.

The first one misses. The second doesn’t. It clips my right shoulder, tearing open the down stuffing of my coat. Hot blood seeps down my bicep, and the wound itself sears, but it doesn’t hurt. I clutch at it on instinct, still facing the hunter, who stands a few paces away, feet apart, gun trained at my chest. 

They touch their ear and turn their head away from me, speaking in that same clinical, flat voice. “Primary target went out the back. Deal with secondary.”

The exchange takes a few seconds. I watch it, my mind racing, sliding the closed switchblade up my sleeve. 

This person is like me, another one of Mercury’s playthings. The rest I have to figure out by myself, without the help of whatever tools Mercury has stuffed into my skull. I don’t know whether they mean to take me back to Mercury or if they mean to kill me, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is, they have the same strange set of skills that I do, but they’ve been trained in how to use them, and I’ve lost the element of surprise, which has until this point been my only real advantage. 

I can’t see into the hunter’s head, get a read on them at all. I’m not sure why this is, whether Mercury has made it so or whether it’s the same sort of twin force that refuses to allow magnets of like poles to meet. The ‘why’ of isn’t important right now. The point is, I can’t read them, and I know they can’t read me, because if they could, they’d have sensed the flash-bang of a plan that’s just gone off in my mind.

These thoughts click over one another like falling dominos, and by the time the hunter finishes speaking, I’ve reached the inevitable conclusion. If I’m going to do anything to stop this, it has to be now. 

Without hesitation, I throw myself at them, or more specifically, at the gun in their hands, flinging my entire body weight at it. They stagger backward, grunting, and the gun goes off wildly, into the sky or the parking lot of the 7/11. 

I elbow them in the groin as hard as I can and yank the gun from them. They grunt and hunch over on reflex, and before they can recover, I flip the gun in my hand so I’m gripping the muzzle, still hot from firing, and bring the butt of it down on their face. At the same time, I let the switchblade slip down my sleeve and into my other hand, sliding it open and driving it up toward the gap between the bulletproof vest and their belt.

They can’t stop both, so they take the gun to the face, catching my wrist and twisting until I’m forced to drop the switchblade, which clatters over the pavement. They knock the gun from my hand at the bottom of my swing. I kick it backward and it spins away, knocking into a long-abandoned milk crate. 

After that they sweep my feet out from under me with a neat kick and I land hard on my back, air forced out of my lungs. They straddle my chest, one knee pressed into the soft part of my throat and pull a knife from somewhere on their person. The knife is four inches long, tapering into a slight hook at the end, the bottom part of the blade serrated.

The whole fight, start to finish, takes less than five minutes. 

“This was supposed to be neat,” they say conversationally, “But I think I’d rather gut you.”

So Mercury does want me dead.

I can barely think for the need to breathe, blackness buzzing in the edges of my vision. Beneath me, my shirt has ridden up, cold pavement and leftover broken glass pressing into my lower back.

I get an idea.

“Dickhead,” I gasp, pushing fruitlessly at their knee.

Without letting up on the pressure they’ve got on my throat, they smack my hand aside and lean down so their face is closer to mine. The mask covers everything below their eyes, eyes dark as mine are now, just as methodical and cold. They pull the mask down, and I see them, the lines of their face uncompromising. 

“Clever,” they say, sneering down at me, blood coating their even teeth red, “For white trash. Ironic how you’re all born in the gutter, scrabble and claw your whole lives trying to get out, and then end up dying in the gutter despite all your effort.” Eye to eye with me, they test the blade against the pad of their thumb, gaze lidded and half-bored. “I’m going to enjoy this.”

At my side, my fingers close around a shard of glass, the ragged edges scraping against the rough callouses of my palm. I squeeze until I feel the blood oozing through the cracks in my fingers and then I laugh, the sound leaking from me like a wheeze. They hesitate, not so much taken aback as curious.

“I’ve fucked guys like you,” I manage. “You’re always massively overcompensating.”

I stab them in the thigh, twist, and yank the glass back out in one fluid movement, dropping the glass to thrust their face back with my bloodied hand, at the same time forcing their knife hand away from me and shoving them off balance, which allows me to roll away and to my feet. 

I’m already halfway down the length of the motel, moving backward as they lurch to their feet.

“If you check, you’ll find I’ve stabbed you in your femoral artery,” I call cheerfully. “Either stop the bleeding or pass out and die, ‘Dickhead’. Pro tip: I’d move quick.”

Then I turn and sprint away, around the corner of the motel before they can respond.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all folks! Well, it's not, I'm going to post the second chapter in a second.
> 
> A side note: I don't know if this'll be confusing in any way, but when Emmett refers to the hunter as a guy toward the end of this chapter, he's not misgendering them. Our new friend uses he/they pronouns, though I'll be mostly using 'they' pronouns for most of the fic. 
> 
> I thought it'd mess up the flow of the action sequence to insert a postscript about this, so for posterity's sake: the hunter (whose name we'll learn later) along with using he/they pronouns is comfortable with certain gendered labels like 'guy' but not with others. So they wouldn't ever refer to themselves as a boy or a man, but more casual labels like 'guy' or 'dude' (although I don't personally consider dude to be gendered) are fine. And Emmett, with his super psychic powers, can sense this, for reasons which may become clear later on. 
> 
> Hopefully this makes sense, and if it doesn't, I'm more than happy to clarify. As someone who has struggled with finding comfortable gendered labels and pronouns myself, I get that it can be pretty confusing, so. 
> 
> Anyway! Next chapter incoming, see you in a bit.
> 
> ~Iz


	12. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emmett ~reflects~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And...we're back.
> 
> Yada yada. The single quotations are italics, although I don't think there 'are' any italics in this chapter, so I guess proceed blithely ahead.
> 
> -Iz

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]

I find Steve in the room, with one of the hunter’s cohorts locked in the last stages of a chokehold. The man’s eyes roll back in his head and Steve drops him on the carpet with a heavy thud. The other man is slumped half on the bed closest to the door, face down on the floral comforter. The room itself bears little evidence of the violence that has just occurred, aside from the shattered coffee pot, which has been tossed in the corner. 

I stop in the doorway and Steve looks up at me, brushing off his hands.

“There he is.”

“Shut up,” I mumble.

“Where’s my knife?”

“I lost it,” I say, nudging the heel of one of the unconscious men with my toe. “I slowed down the other guy, but I don’t know how long that will last.”

“Yeah, these two will come around in a minute or so,” Steve says. As if in response, the man faceplanted in the floral comforter twitches and moans. Steve frowns down at him. “We should get out of here.”

“We?”

“Hey, you haven’t tried to stab me, so I’m choosing to take that as a good sign.”

I roll my eyes, and he flashes a wide, boyishly charming grin. 

“Don’t read into it,” I say, “Like you said, you’re my only option.”

“I’ll take it.”

We’re gone a minute later, Steve pulling out of the motel parking lot and almost immediately onto the highway. We’re headed north, into light traffic, and after about half an hour, Steve pulls off again to switch out the car. We end up in a parking garage in the deserted downtown of a tiny lower peninsula city, abandoning the truck for another mediocre vehicle, this one a tiny blue Volkswagen bug with no working radio.

I try and force the passenger seat backward while Steve flips down the visor, catching the keys that fall out.

“What’re we going to do about the fact that they’re tracking me?”

“I’ve got a plan,” Steve says. “Well, I’ve had a plan. We’re meeting a friend of mine.”

As he says it, a hard-eyed, red-haired woman takes up my vision. Natasha. It occurs to me that she had a hand in putting together the file still in Steve’s inside jacket pocket.

“Where?”

“It’s a neutral place,” he hedges, “Out of the way. Discreet.”

“You’re describing it like it’s a high-end escort.”

The tips of his ears flare red. “I know you don’t like it, but you’ve trusted me this far. What’s a few more miles?”

I pull at the seatbelt, uneasy. “I never said I trusted you.”

“Fair enough.”

He starts the engine and puts the car in reverse. 

The ride devolves into tense silence, road noise filling the cab. We bump back onto the highway and I fish the first-aid kit out from under my seat and wrap an ace bandage around the shallow wound on my upper arm. Then I ball my blood-stained hoodie up and lean back against the window, using it as a cushion for my head, and pretend to fall asleep.

In my mind’s eye, I see the hunter, in the moment they revealed their face. The shock hadn’t penetrated into that moment, hyped up as I had been on adrenaline and raw, heady fear. 

I guess I should dwell on the relative normality of their appearance. Unlike me, they could’ve made their way through a public place without eliciting any second glances, any expressions of horror or distaste. Their skin was normal, a medium dark brown, smooth and unblemished, but most importantly, not translucent. 

I don’t dwell on this, though.

As I go over that moment repeatedly in my mind, the car rocking and bumping beneath me, I can’t get over their age. They were ‘young’, as old as I am, maybe a little older. I don’t know this in the exact way I knew about Steve’s height or the gap in Sam’s teeth. Instead, the certainty pulls at me like an ache. 

I sense it the way I used to sense things, the way I felt affection for Sarah Marshall when she got out of her boyfriend’s Volvo, map in hand, waving me down for directions, or the way I knew to trust Brendan when he swooped in and threw his arm over my shoulder the first time we met, telling the cop he was my older brother. More than that, I feel it in the way I used to feel things, with conviction uncolored by cynicism or doubt. 

As I think about this, I remember the basement at Mercury, the fourteen other containment units, only one of them empty. I don’t know what this means. I don’t know this person’s origins, or where Mercury found them. All I know is that Mercury changed them the way they changed me and sent them to kill me. Mercury wants me dead, and they want this person to do it, and they seem more than willing to comply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> K, so both of the chapters this week were super short? Do with that what you will. I was thinking about posting a third chapter, but I think that'd induce a bit of whiplash and mess up the pacing I'm trying to achieve. So, sorry for my brevity this week but next week I promise there'll be more content, if more content is what you enjoy. 
> 
> There is one section later on (which I think according to schedule will be posted about three weeks from now? Jesus. Time truly isn't real. Anyway.) where I'll be posting four chapters at once, for the sake of pacing. You'll see why when it comes along, and I'll provide more context if needed as we get closer to that event. 
> 
> So, that's all folks, I'll see you next week! 
> 
> -Iz


	13. The Intricacies of Tourniquets and Jack-O-Lantern Grins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emmett's new friend tries not to bleed out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Thanksgiving, y'all. If you're in the States and you celebrate, I hope your holiday is happy and full of as much cheer as can be mustered in the midst of this pandemic. If you're in the States and Thanksgiving represents something different to you -- maybe it's a bad reminder, a reminder of this country's egregious shortcomings and failure -- then I hope you find whatever peace is possible in this time. 
> 
> Now, for the story.
> 
> As usual, single quotation marks indicate italics. 
> 
> Onward, and all that.

[The Hunter (OC) POV]

Emmett Faust flashes his biggest shit-eating grin at me and darts around the corner, out of sight. I wait until he’s gone to curse and yank off my glove, pressing a hand to the wound in my thigh. Blood seeps through my fingers in surges, more with every beat of my heart. I can tell at once that what he said to me is true. He found the femoral artery in one try, the force and placement of the blow exactly right.

I sink against the wall of the motel and lower myself into a sitting position. I don’t have much time, I know, and I can’t risk going after Faust or his companion unless I want to risk bleeding out in front of them. 

It takes me a few minutes to apply a hasty tourniquet over my pantleg, using my belt and a broken-off piece of a nearby wooden milkcrate to do so. Tourniquets should hurt. In fact, most of the time they need to hurt in order to be effective. This isn’t true for me, which makes the application easier and quicker than it would be otherwise.

I push myself to my feet and use the wall to keep weight off of my injured leg. The process is laborious, and slow, the makeshift tourniquet jostled with every other step. There’s a kit in the car that has the equipment for a deliberate tourniquet if I can make it there, which will be less likely to be knocked out of place and rendered ineffective. 

I hear a car start and exit the motel parking lot, a gold F150 judging by the sound of the engine, Faust and his friend inside. A spare second of focus confirms what I suspected – Brady and Elijah have been neutralized. They aren’t hurt seriously, but they’re useless now and in the immediate future.

Without much effort, I can predict what the next few hours will bring. The clean-up crew will arrive to take care of this mess and any lingering questions from motel guests or staff. Brady, Elijah, and I will be transported back to headquarters, where we’ll be separated, treated, and then questioned. If our reports don’t match exactly, the consequences will be dire. If they do match, we will be disciplined, but there will be significantly less peril.

These considerations don’t take up much space for me as I drag myself to the car and into the backseat, pulling the kit up from the trunk. Instead, as I treat the wound, this time with the assistance of a windlass rod to help tighten the tourniquet, I dwell on Emmett Faust.

I knew he’d be strong, and I knew he’d be fast, but he has never undergone training. The reports given to me before the start of the mission should’ve told me everything I needed to know. Height, weight, background. All of it. 

For any other target, the rest would be filled in the moment I had them in range, but Emmett is different, in the way I am different. 

‘The target is brutal’, I had been told. ‘Vicious. Because of the nature of this target, you may be tempted to hesitate.’ 

I hadn’t hesitated. I’d lingered. And that’d been just as stupid a mistake.

The worst part is, I have no idea ‘why’ I lingered. Going over the fight second by second in my head, all I can come up with is the ecstatic, mulish look on his face when I had him pinned on the ground, like he’d ended up exactly where he wanted to be.

By that point, he should’ve been dead three times over. I knew this. I think he knew this. He’d been smart enough or scared enough to run in the first place. Maybe what bothers me the most is I fell for it – that look on his face, his laughter, his defiant asinine insult.

He didn’t even try to use the gun when he had it. He couldn’t have known it wouldn’t work, a sensor in the trigger tuned to only my fingerprint. A bullet would’ve been the best, quickest way to stop me, and in the split-second with the gun in his hand, he didn’t even try to take that obvious chance. Instead, he used it as a bludgeon. 

Graceless. Ugly. Nonsensical. 

He acted as I’d been told he would act. He fought dirty, like I’d been told he would do, operating more on instinct and raw experience than on any real skill. 

And yet. 

I pulled down my mask. I showed him my face. I ‘lectured’ him, for God’s sake. 

For all the limited intel I’d been given on him, I hadn’t known Emmet Faust when I met him, not in the way I usually know a person. He remains one of the only people in the world I can’t read, our mutual origins excluding this possibility.

‘He acted like he knew you’, the quiet voice from the back of my mind whispers, almost indistinguishable from my own thoughts. I’m used to it now, but I shiver, dizzy from the loss of blood. ‘But he doesn’t know you. He can’t know you, just like you can’t know him.’

“But he knew me anyway,” I murmur to myself.

‘Yes’, the voice sighs. ‘He did’.

I sense Elijah’s approach before he ducks his head down to look at me. 

“Whoa,” he says, “That’s a lot of blood. You call for back-up yet?”

“Keen observation,” I say through my teeth. “And, no, I’ve been a little busy. Where’s Brady?”

“The second target knocked out his gold tooth. He’s looking for it.”

He sidesteps a key detail like it’s a missing stair and I direct my best, coldest look up at him. He squirms. “Elijah,” I say lowly. “Don’t bullshit me. Who was the second target?”

I know before he can answer me. “Steve Rogers.”

I lean my head back against the window and close my eyes, wondering briefly if Shaw, my immediate superior, had known this before she sent me and these two inept henchmen after Faust. It remains as a distinct, distasteful possibility. 

‘This has to be done quickly and quietly’, she told me.

“Call headquarters,” I say flatly, “And don’t spare any details this time.”

“You’re not going to bleed out in the meantime?” asks Elijah. “Should I get Brady?”

Brady is a trained medic. 

“Don’t ask me questions if you know the answer,” I say. When he doesn’t move, I lift my head and snap, “‘Yes’, get Brady. And be quick about it for once.” 

He retreats, leaving me with the memory of the jack-o-lantern grin spreading over Faust’s brazen, impish face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is incoming. I'll see you in a minute.
> 
> -Iz


	14. Superspies Get Lonely Too

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha can't manage to get over herself and move on

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's your second chapter for the week. As usual, single quotation marks indicate italics. Enjoy! This one's part cathartic wallowing and part vindictive misery. Cheerful, I know.
> 
> Anyway. Onward, upward, etc.

[Natasha Romanoff POV]

A car idles on the curb of a neat city neighborhood, the houses close together and quiet. Natasha Romanoff sits inside it, parked across the street from a yellow two-story with a familiar blue Fiat sitting in the driveway. The Fiat has a Warren 2020 sticker and a Lesbian flag sticker stuck to the rear window.

Even if it didn’t have these distinguishing markers, Natasha would know it by the license plate and the address of the house next to which it’s parked. A curtain moves in the house’s front window and Natasha watches, glad for the dark tint of this rental’s windows. Her phone sits on her thigh. 

It buzzes as she cranes her neck forward, trying to get a better view of the two-story’s backyard. Tony again. And, transparently, Peter, who is in the middle of midterms and an identity crisis and wouldn’t have the wherewithal in his self-centered teenage body to check in with her unless Tony told him to do so.

She slides the text from Tony open. Replies, ‘Really? Peter? How very capitalist and utilitarian of you, T.’

He calls her. She answers and immediately hangs up. He calls again. She hangs up again. The next text is towering in its fury. She sends him a GIF of a toddler throwing a tantrum and shuts down her phone.

When she looks up again, Sharon has appeared on the front steps of the two-story, holding the screen door open. The wind whips her blonde ponytail in a picturesque way, and Natasha is reminded of widow’s walks and moonlight on stormy seas and long-lost lovers, even as she sits in an upper corner of the Midwest watching her ex-girlfriend squint at the idling car, her pinched expression deciding whether or not to be pissed.

She twists to talk to someone inside before she latches the door shut behind her and stalks down the front walk and across the empty road. Before she can reach the car, Natasha rolls down the window, and Sharon stops in the middle of the street, her hands balled into fists at her side, her expression settling firmly into stony anger.

“Hey babe.”

Sharon stalks toward the car, leaning down so she can peer through the window. “What are you doing here.” Her tone makes this firmly Not a Question.

“I was in the area.”

“You are stalking me,” Sharon informs her, voice low as if the occupants of the house behind her might hear. “I was not kidding when I told you I would get a restraining order. You need to stop this.”

“I am not stalking you,” Natasha says, hurt.

“What do you call showing up to my sister’s house in the middle of the day on a Wednesday in a state which it has conveniently never occurred to you to visit until now?” Sharon demands.

“It looks bad, I know,” Natasha admits, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel. “A restraining order? You don’t think that’s a little extreme?”

“I told you when I left that I didn’t want to see you or talk to you or be reminded of your existence until I was ready,” Sharon says, “Until ‘I’ reached out. Jesus, Nat. This is why every relationship you’ve ever had has imploded on you.”

“I’m sorry. I told you I was sorry!” Natasha exclaims, more to herself than to Sharon. “I don’t know what else you want from me. And anyway, I’m not here about…any of that.”

“Sure,” Sharon scoffs, crossing her arms and straightening up again. “How long did it take you to get here? That’s an out of state plate. Did you drive all the way here?”

“Maybe.”

Natasha stares straight ahead, trying to convince herself she didn’t hear the drop from annoyance to concern in Sharon’s voice. Sharon knows that the white noise of the road rolling under car tires clears Natasha’s head in a way nothing else does. Sharon knows this because there would be nights when Natasha would drive and drive down empty roads, the headlights the only light for miles while she curled up in the passenger seat, sweatshirt pulled over her shoulders like a blanket, fast asleep.

What Sharon doesn’t know, and what aches most when Natasha slows down enough for the memory to catch up to her, is that she would glance over at Sharon and feel an indefinable something loosen in her chest. Like walls coming down. Like shutting and locking the door behind you, after a long day or a bloody chase or the insistent pressure of a thousand different sets of eyes. Like knowing you’ve made it, and you’re finally safe.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Sharon says. “You need to leave. Right now. Or I’m calling the cops.”

“You don’t even want to know why I’m here?”

“No,” Sharon says, her shoulders squared, her chin lifted. “Frankly, Nat, I’m not in the mood to hear whatever excuse it is you’ve made up to try and get me to…you know what? I don’t even know what it is that you want from me.”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

The hard glint in her eyes lessens, lowers like a gun. “That’s not true. Even if you won’t admit it to yourself, you know that’s not true.”

“You’d call the police on me?”

She sighs and turns away, done. “Go home, Nat. Or wherever it is you’re supposed to be.”

“If you’d stop accusing me of stalking for a second, you’d know that I’m on my way to help a friend,” Natasha calls, “And I thought maybe you’d want to help me out.”

“I don’t.” Sharon’s voice is closed, cold. It starts to snow in tiny, bare flakes. “For a world class spy, you are phenomenally clueless. I am here to help my sister. I already helped Steve, because I’m a good friend, but I am ‘not’ going to be pulled into another world-race ‘Fugitive’-style conspiracy just because my friends and my ex can’t be normal for five fucking minutes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go eat cold Mac-n-Cheese and watch Paw Patrol with a four-year-old.”

“Sharon, wait!”

Natasha finds herself getting out of the car, reaching for her. Sharon regards the place where Natasha’s fingers grip her forearm, an incredulous scorn curling her mouth. She tugs at the hold, as if testing Natasha’s commitment to this course of action, and Natasha doesn’t let go. The sleeve of Sharon’s faux-leather jacket is slippery and cold.

“You want to do this?” Sharon asks.

Natasha doesn’t answer, because the only answer she has will make her sound like an asshole and a creep. The kind of creep that follows their ex and uses physical intimidation to try and ‘make’ her see sense.

The kind of creep who gives in and says, “If we do this, I will win.”

The kind of creep who keeps hanging on as their ex replies through gritted teeth, eyes flashing, “This isn’t a competition, Nat. I mean, do you want to do this here, with my sister watching, in front of the house where my little nephew lives. I’m making sure this is the choice you’re really making. You want to prove me right? Because this is how you do it.”

“This,” Natasha says, aware that she towers over Sharon, “Funnily enough, is not about you. I didn’t mean to lose my cool. I’m sorry.”

“Then let go of me.”

Natasha does so, with a flair the action does not require. “I’m going to meet Steve. And I’m not here for myself. I wouldn’t ask for your help if I had any other choice. He thinks Hydra is tracking the kid.”

“What, did Mercury catch up with them?”

“I don’t know. He asked about the likelihood that Hydra chipped the kid, wanted to know if he should be worried about it,” Natasha says. “And that’s the last I’ve heard from him.”

“Jesus, Nat. He’s in trouble?”

She shrugs. “Maybe. Probably. But when are we not in trouble?”

“And you’re sitting in a car across from where I’m staying doing nothing?”

Natasha smirks thinly. “I’m not doing nothing. I’m here, asking Steve’s good friend whether she has the prototype we’ve been working on.”

“What makes you think I’d have it with me?”

“Because you always bring your work with you.”

Sharon shakes her head, resigned. “I told him this wasn’t a good idea. I warned all of you that this would go to shit, and I was right, wasn’t I? Put it on the record that I was right.”

“Yeah, we’d all be a lot better off if we listened to your advice,” Natasha says, and it sounds scathing, but she’s sincere.

“One day, you’re going to need me and I’m going to say no,” Sharon says bitterly.

“Not today though.”

Sharon doesn’t say anything because if she speaks the next two words out of her mouth will be, ‘Fuck you’ and she’s too good a person to lash out like that.

“I’ll wait in the car,” Natasha says into the silence.

“No,” Sharon manages. “It’s off-site.”

“What? Why?”

“Because” Sharon says like Natasha’s dense, “I’m not going to leave that stuff where a four-year-old can find it.”

“Oh. Where is it?”

“My brother-in-law’s parents’ old house,” she says. “His mother just moved into a care-home and they’re in the middle of boxing everything up. It’s a safe middle-ground.”

“All right. I’ll drive you.”

“Yeah, just a second, I need to go let Hope know I’m leaving.” She goes back to the house, jogging up the front steps and sticking her head through the door to call inside. Natasha returns to the warmth of the car.

Sharon returns and opens the passenger door, a gust of cold wind and snowflakes proceeding her. “I’ve got to know that if I get in this vehicle, you’re going to let me out again.”

“Really, Shar?” 

Sharon looks down at her, sad and grim. “I mean it, Nat. I told Hope I’ll be back in an hour.”

A fissure which has slowly been inching its way through Natasha’s chest since she saw Sharon on the steps widens as she looks up at her. Something cold and scared and desperate yawns beneath it, and it might be why she doesn’t hesitate when she says,

“I’m not going to fucking abduct you. Don’t be ridiculous.”

In her defense, it won’t really be an abduction. Just a coerced rescue mission. Besides, if Sharon believes her, that’s her own fault. She knows better than anyone that all Natasha does is lie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> K, this is where I bow out until next week. I'll see you then.
> 
> -Iz


	15. Gin Rummy and Other Cut-Throat Card Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the veteran and the pickpocket have a conversation

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]

From time to time, Steve pulls off at random exits, makes a series of left turns, and pulls back out, making sure that no one follows us. He drives as fast as the little car can go, the speedometer flicking steadily at eighty, the engine straining in protest. 

Eventually, I sit back up and pull my dirty hoodie back over my head before I slump down in the seat, propping my feet on the dashboard. I’m not a tall person, but even for me, this tiny car is claustrophobic and cramped.

Over in the driver’s seat Steve releases an irritated sigh, the only sign of life he’s given off in the last two hours. “Please put your feet down.”

I straighten and return my feet to the floor. “This isn’t the first time you’ve been on the run.”

“It isn’t,” he says. “Why?”

“You seem very prepared, is all.”

He’s quiet, gazing absently out the windshield before he clicks on the turn signal and slips around a slow-moving semi. “I have this philosophy that if I prepare for the worst to happen, then I’m in a much better position to corral any potential damage.”

“Hm.”

He slides back into the righthand lane, glancing briefly over at me. “What, that answer not convincing enough for you?”

“It’s not what I meant.”

“Help me out, then.”

I sigh. “‘Prepared’ wasn’t the right word to use. You’re not prepared. Prepared is having an ice-scraper in your car during winter. This is different. You’re ready to run. The cars waiting for you, the rendezvous, the go-bag you have stashed in the backseat. You’ve made it so you can split whenever you want or feel you need to. It’s a whole other thing.”

“I guess you could say that.” He says this cordially, almost jovially, adjusting his grip on the steering wheel as my words pick at some old, unseen wound.

“You’ve also got the box in your pocket.”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t so much as twitch, gaze trained straight ahead. 

“You took it out of the glovebox of the truck when we left it in the parking garage,” I continue, “And you’ve had in on you since then. What, did Sam track it down for you before he left?”

I ask this on a hunch, and though Steve remains impassive, I sense the slight increase in his heartrate and know that I’m right.

“No offense,” he says, voice cool and firm, “But that’s none of your business.”

“Oh, I know.”

He considers saying more, wrestling with himself for a minute or so before he finally decides to speak. “Sometimes you take actions you wouldn’t normally take for the sake of someone else. In the past, I was forced to make choices I’d rather not have had to make, and I wasn’t ready then. I didn’t want to be caught off guard again. That’s what all this is about.”

“Cool,” I say. “Who was it? The someone else?”

Again, Steve pauses. He doesn’t want to tell me, but the reasons have less to do with me than some other murky inner battle. “My best friend.”

I asked the question in hopes of getting an image, or a name, but none comes to me, the lockbox of the identity sealed tight, a Pandora’s box Steve won’t or can’t open, even in his own mind.

He tells me all this not because he trusts me or because he likes me, but because he hopes that by sharing this personal information, I’ll be inclined to reciprocate. I know exactly what he’s doing.

On Tuesday nights, my grandma would leave me with the neighbors and go play gin rummy with her friends. They all knew each other from an old support group, elderly ladies with smokers’ coughs and long-dead asshole husbands who would all meet up to cheat each other out of pennies and dimes and butterscotch hard candies, betting on the winning hand.

On nights when the neighbors were out or wouldn’t take me, she brought me with her. I would sit under the table with a Rubik’s cube or a library book. Coins and candy would clatter across the table above me, and I listened to them cackle and gossip and accuse each other of counting cards.

Once, I asked my grandma how to play. She refused to tell me. My grandpa had been a gambling addict and she wasn’t about to give me an instruction manual on how to end up sad and dead like him, she said. The only rule she ever taught me she taught me unintentionally, less a lesson than a rule of life.

The cards in your hand are useful only because other people don’t know what you’ve got, she told me. The moment you play those cards, win or lose, it’s over, and the cards don’t have a use anymore, for you or anyone else at the table. The same goes if you show your hand. You don’t show those cards to anybody – not your landlord, not your own brother, not your best friend. You don’t swear someone to secrecy and show them. You don’t draw up a legal agreement and show them. You don’t fall in love and show them. You don’t show them ever, period, until you make the strategic decision to play your hand, and by god, you’d better pick that moment perfectly. 

In other words: don’t trust anybody, be able to read a room, and know when and how to best use what you’ve got or what you know. It’s a simple matter of survival.

Steve is playing a few of his cards in hopes that I’ll play all of mine. I’m not doing that. It’s bad strategy, and I know better. He’s already forced my identity out of me, which couldn’t be helped, and if I have anything to do with it, that’s all he’s going to get.

“Your best friend, huh?” I say eventually. “Seems pretty stupid to bet everything you’ve got on one other person. That have anything to do why no one likes you anymore?”

Steve realizes I’m not going to cop to anything, and replies, “I never said no one likes me.”

“You pretty much did say that.”

“Well, if no one did like me, that’d be all right,” he says absently. “As long as I’ve got people by my side who know the truth about who I am.”

“Truth is relative,” I say, “And people are dupes.”

He sighs and gives up, and we don't speak again until he pulls the tiny VW off at the next exit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey y'all. I know I usually have a note at the beginning, but there's no single quotations for you to read as italics today, so I thought it might be redundant. Anyway. These are the moments I love to write, the in-between moments that give a little more insight into our cast of characters.
> 
> More incoming. I'm excited! I'm still quite a bit ahead in terms of what I have written, so I'm planning on keeping my upload schedule as promised. Life has gotten busy recently, and it's only going to get busier, but this whole fic is a practice in commitment! I'm going to get it done. I'm going to post all of it, and I'm not going to end up eating my words. That's the goal.
> 
> I'll see you in a sec with chapter number two for this week. 
> 
> -Iz


	16. Relics of Bad Science Past Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our resident antagonist battles their doubt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Single quotations equal italics etc. etc. Carry on.

[The Hunter (OC) POV]

By the time the clean-up crew arrives at the motel, the bleeding has mostly stopped. Brady helps the med team lift me into the back of the windowless black van that doubles as a sort of informal, makeshift ambulance. Satisfied that I’m stable, the EMT hooks me up to an IV for a blood transfusion and gives me a juice box.

I zone out for the rest of the ride, dreading the return to headquarters. 

Headquarters, also known as the Compound, has a cover story just like the rest of Mercury. It is allegedly a training facility for a private security company, and for the most part, it looks like what it’s supposed to be – a campus of buildings behind barbed wire, operating as the primary employer of the tiny no-name city in whose outskirts it has deigned to settle.

It has also been home to me, on and off, for the last six years of my life. 

After the push and pull of winding back roads, we arrive. I lift myself up on my elbows as the driver shows ID to the guard. The guard has her open up the back for a cursory search before he waves us onward, signaling someone in the booth to let us in. 

Through the windshield, I watch the massive gate roll open, the rattle medieval as castle drawbridges lowered over impassable moats. The van pulls through the lifted partition past the gate and into the Compound beyond. 

Upon exiting the van, I’m escorted first to the armory to return my munitions – the banged up gun, and three knives, including the hunting knife, which I’ve taken to thinking of as mine - and then back to the Dormitory, the place I live in-between missions. The armed guard leaves me at the door, where I use a retina scan and a five-digit password to gain entrance. From there, I pass through the empty common area and take the elevator to the third floor.

My footsteps echo off the linoleum floors and cinderblock walls, the halls deserted and dark. This place has been borderline empty for as long as I’ve known it, the air thick with dust and chilled with a hacky heating system that no one ever bothers to turn on. The appliances in the kitchenette downstairs are outdated and ancient, seemingly designed to serve as set pieces for a late 19th century period drama rather than to toast bread or heat up soup. 

The rooms themselves are used mostly for storage, except for room 304, which has always unofficially been mine. None of the room doors have locks, so I let myself in without needing a key. The sound of the door latching shut behind me spills a quiet wave of relief through the entirety of my body. It’s the sensation, weary and familiar, of being home. The tension in my chest eases, the tight muscles in my neck and shoulders loosen, and now that I am within reach of real, if temporary, rest, I allow myself to feel the heavy pull of exhaustion. 

The narrow bed is the only furniture occupying the space, pushed into the far-right corner by yours truly. Other than that, I have an alcove for a closet and an upside-down laundry basket I pilfered for a nightstand, home to a camp lantern and three worn paperback books.

The single window is deep set and narrow due to the thickness of the cinderblock, located high up in the wall, the light that comes through it wane and dull with midwinter. 

At first glance, it seems scant, but I’m here so rarely that there’s really no point in anything else. Besides, I don’t really get cold and being around other people for too long around here gives me headaches, so the Dormitory is one of the only places in the Compound where I’m guaranteed any peace.

I drop onto the bed and for a second, just a second, let myself close my eyes.

In an hour, I need to be cleaned up and ready to brief Shaw, and I indulge in a quick, electric tug of dread. I’ve failed. I know this. I also know that if I think about ‘why’ I failed for very long, I’ll come to a mutinous, inevitable conclusion. 

Everything about this mission was the inverse of Mercury’s usual MO. Typically, there are weeks of prep and a sea of recon work before they send me out. Typically, I have the target’s whole life plotted out ahead of time, everything from their schedule to the layout of the inside of their heads. 

This mission had a frantic, harried bent to it from the time it started. The whites around the eyes of the handlers and other higher-ups were flared wild and wide, an edge that even the suppressors they used to keep me out of their heads couldn’t fully muffle.

I read up on Faust on our way to the motel, skimming his scant file. ‘He’s a failed model’, Shaw told me. ‘Releasing him is an act of sabotage meant to reveal Mercury and destroy its public image. Take him out, and the clean-up crew will retrieve his body’. 

She spun it like neutralizing Faust was a matter of scandal, of patching up botched PR.

It had to be me, she said. I was the only one who could bring him down in the way she wanted – or the way corporate wanted – quietly, without a big fuss. 

All this, I get. I’m the one who cleans up the messes that never should’ve been made in the first place. Someone somewhere fucks up and I become the variable that balances out that equation.  
I am the last step, the slip of potassium chloride in the veins, the noose around the neck, the weight of stones on the chest. By the time I come along, you’re already dead. I’m just the thing that does the work of killing you.

Eventually I open my eyes and sit up, purposefully propelling myself through the process of getting undressed. A clean towel and fresh pair of clothes has been set, neatly folded, at the end of the bed and I use the reality of the hot shower waiting for me as motivation. The bullet proof vest I left in the armory, and so I’m left with the task of peeling off the last bloodied remnants of my tactical gear. Each step inexorably reminds me of Faust. My pants are ruined, the tough material of the right leg ripped up the thigh to clear the way for the deliberate tourniquet. Besides that, the outer layers of clothing are soaked and tacky with my own blood.

The moment he stabbed me plays over and over in my head, the last vestiges of his bloodied handprint dried in the collar of my shirt. All I have to do is think about it and I have the feeling of blood smearing over my skin vivid as when it happened.

Just like the handprint, the questions linger.

Why did Mercury want Faust dead at all? When he failed to assimilate, why not put a needle in his neck and be done with it, dispose of him before he ever had the chance to become this sort of problem? Why store him away in some basement cryofreezer like your kid’s fifth grade science project? If they kept Faust, this has to mean they kept other failed assets like him. Right?

Typically, the answers to these sorts of questions don’t bother me, but I’ve got the afterimage of Faust’s macabre grin in my head and I can’t get it out. 

It takes an undue amount of effort to finish undressing, leaving me in my boxers and undershirt, everything else a bloody pile in the corner when the door to my room swings open.

“Welcome back,” Sabrina says, leaning against the doorframe.

Sabrina is the only other asset like me with whom I’ve ever interacted. Until recently, I thought she and I were the only specimens Mercury had collected.

She grew up in Ontario and went to college in Boston, losing her family and then her sorority sisters in eerily similar fires on her path to a number of increasingly obscure English degrees. Mercury found her in the early 2000s after the community college where she was employed fired her for conduct unbecoming. The conduct in question happened to revolve around three favorite students, her girlfriend at the time, and another suspicious and deadly fire which killed all four of them. The police and community were so sure that she did it, and the local news had a field day, but there wasn’t ever enough proof to reasonably bring her to trial.

This is, at least, what she has told me. It’s wise to never take anything Sabrina has to say at face value.

“I thought I asked you to knock,” I tell her without looking up, turning my attention instead to the place where Emmett Faust stabbed me.

“A year and a half and that’s the greeting you give me?” she demands, not sounding too put out. Sabrina is, at her best and worse, a performer, every word and every deed executed to get the desired reaction from her audience, whoever that happens to be.

She comes over to the bed and flops down next to me, reaching for my hand. I let her take it. “Clue me in. What’s going on? Why’d they wake me up three months early? Who did that to you?” Gently, she nudges her knee with mine, voice soft and persistent. “C’mon, kiddo. Let me see.”

Without speaking, I turn my leg to show her what’s left of the wound, which has healed to a puckered, pinkish scar. She releases my hand and runs a finger over the jagged length of it. It’ll heal to nothing soon enough, and a part of me wishes it wouldn’t.

The light touch prickles and I pull away. “How long have you been out of the freezer?”

She rolls her eyes and makes a show of looking at her watch. “Oh, let me see…eight hours, thirty-two minutes, and fifty-six seconds, give or take.”

“They haven’t told you anything?”

She shrugs one shoulder, the question boring her. “When do they ever? Igor brought me to life and had me frog-marched over here almost as soon as I opened my eyes, told me Shaw would get to me eventually. Quivering little asshole.”

Igor is our nickname for Simon St. John, the lab assistant of Monica Combs – aka Frankenstein – the project supervisor in charge of keeping us deadly and alive. 

I absorb this information and Sabrina heaves a melodramatic sigh, slouching down on my bed. “So, are you going to share, or am I going to have to wait for Shaw to show up and ruin the vibe?”

The mention of Shaw kills the remainder of my fledging relief. 

“There was a break-in at the lab in Detroit yesterday,” I say flatly. “The people behind it did a lot of shit, but the most relevant part to us is the breech of their holding facility.”

Sabrina frowns. “I didn’t even know they had a holding facility down there.”

“Neither did I,” I murmur, before turning to her. Her body language remains as apparently indolent as usual, eyes lidded as she leans back on her hands. “A failed experiment escaped, or was let loose, and Shaw sent me after him.”

“Because we’re the only ones with a chance of stopping him, and you happened to be awake,” Sabrina fills in, tone still wryly apathetic. “A Kramer vs. Kramer type situation.”

“You’re not surprised.”

“No.” She tilts her head almost thoughtfully. “Not by the bastard’s existence, anyway. I always assumed there were others. You don’t get experiments like us right on the first or second try.” Her gaze sharpens, playful. “Why? Are you? Surprised, I mean.”

“I guess not.”

Shaw has managed with fair efficiency to keep our minds away from secrets we have no business knowing, so I can’t say I’m shocked at this revelation. Still. I couldn’t have ever predicted an outcome like this. 

“He was good, then, I’m assuming from the state of you,” Sabrina continues, reaching over to poke at my cheekbone, the bruising already mottled to a nasty yellow green.

“He wasn’t that good,” I say, evading her. “He was lucky.”

She cackles. “Oh, he hurt your ego, too. Poor baby!”

“It isn’t ego. It’s true,” I insist. “He was completely untrained, barely assimilated, and he ‘looked’ grotesque.”

“It should’ve been a crap shoot, is what you’re saying,” Sabrina intones, “And it wasn’t.”

“Steve Rogers was with him,” I add. “Took Brady and Elijah out like they were nothing.”

“Really? Holy shit.” She thinks about this for a second, pale brows scrunched together. “Was this guy like us, in the pre-existing homicidal urges department?”

“That’s not the weird part,” I say. “Bucky Barnes is guilty of literal war crimes. A little light homicide pales in comparison. If Steve Rogers is picking other kids to be on his superhuman dodgeball team, I don’t think murder ranks very high up on his list of disqualifiers.”

“Yeah, but Barnes was a perfectly nice guy before assimilation,” Sabrina counters. “You and me? Not so much.”

I look away, resisting the urge to pick at the scar, the unpleasant pressure building back up in my chest. 

“Wait a second,” she says, misreading my unease. “Tell me Shaw gave you his background before she sent you in.”

“She did.”

“Well? What crime-ridden back alley did Mercury pluck him from?”

I hesitate, and I’m not sure why. “He…I don’t know.”

“So that asshole did throw you into this blind,” Sabrina murmurs. “I’m no stickler for rules or chain-of-command or all that other bureaucratic bullshit, but if you’re going to have those things, a crisis is not the time to throw them out the window.”

“Shaw told me what he was like,” I correct, “How he would act. The kind of place he came from, the kind of person he is. I guess she didn’t think a detailed background was all that relevant.”

“That wasn’t her call to make, and she knows it,” Sabrina says darkly, “Especially considering how things ended. He could’ve killed you.”

“It’ll take more than a piece of glass jammed in my leg to kill me.”

“You’re not hearing me. I ‘said’ he could’ve killed you. And that’s true, isn’t it?”

She reaches over to grab my chin, her grip hard enough to bruise. I’m forced to meet her gaze and the amoral heat that warms it. 

Sabrina was twenty-three when Mercury picked her up, almost twenty-eight by now, if you string the days and weeks she’s been awake together. She only ever comments obliquely on my age relative to hers, treating me like a sort of puppyish kid brother prone to following her around and nipping at her heels. I never bring up the fact I’d actually be older than her if Mercury never got ahold of us, because though she’d never admit it, she feels this need to protect me. 

I go back and forth on whether she has the capacity to care or not, that capacity here and then gone on a moment to moment basis, but I believe that in whatever way she can care, she cares about me. For all her idiosyncrasies, Sabrina has been the only person to ever give a shit about what happens to me. I’m not going to jeopardize this with a technicality. 

“It is true,” she repeats firmly, “Isn’t it?”

“He only had the opportunity because I left it open,” I say, looking back at her steadily.

She laughs and releases my chin, sits back again. “That doesn’t change what I’m saying. If he wanted to hurt you worse, he would’ve.”

Without summoning it, I picture the split-second when Faust flipped the gun, choosing to hit me with it rather than pull the trigger. Maybe it was nothing more extraordinary than pure gut instinct, a heightened sixth sense that told him he shouldn’t try and fire. 

I want to believe this, but I can’t know it, my inability to access Faust’s psyche preventing any real certainty. And I resent Sabrina’s ability to pick up on my uncertainty, able to read me despite being equally unable to access what’s in my head.

“I have to shower,” I say stiffly, standing up. “Shaw will be here soon.”

“I get it,” she says as if she’s followed this train wreck of thought, “Asking questions makes you itchy. But there’s a fine line between following orders and letting these bastards willfully put you in danger. We’re still valuable to them. They can’t afford to lose us because some VP downstate lost his cool and panicked.”

I gather my towel and change of clothes, keeping the doubt off my face. 

“This is why they kept you on ice so long,” I retort coldly.

“Ouch.” Her voice is deadpan, the glint in her eyes still amused. “Don’t worry. I’m sure Shaw will send me to assimilation the minute she shows up, and there’ll be no one around to make you think anymore.”

“We can only hope,” I say. “Now please get out of my room.” I hold the door open and she sidles out into the dim hallway.

“Fine,” she says loftily, “But don’t come crying to me the next time Shaw tells you to kamikaze.”

“Trust me, I won’t.”

I let the door swing shut and start heading toward the bathroom.

“Out of curiosity,” she calls when I’m most of the way down the hall, “Did she happen to give you a name?”

I turn on my heel to glare at her. She wears her usual impenetrable smirk. I know why she’s asking, and this might be why I tell her, even though I know it’s a step down a path I don’t want to take.

“Faust,” I say. “Emmett Faust.”

The smirk vanishes. “Do not fuck with me, Elián.”

“I’m not.” My pulse increases, heartbeat banging like war drums in my head. “Why? What does that mean to you?”

“This is what Mercury gets for trying to keep us under a fucking rock,” she says, her voice rising, no longer really aware of me. “Emmett fucking Faust, those fucking fuckers.”

“What?” I press. “What is it? Who is he?”

“Go take your shower,” she says distractedly, retreating up the hall. “And when Shaw comes by, don’t press her about it.”

“I thought you said…”

“Don’t listen to what I say! Do you have a braincell left in your skull? I’ll be back later.”

“Sabrina!” I shout, exasperated, but she’s already gone. Instead, I speak to the empty air like she’ll hear me. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Sabrina has a habit of setting fires, metaphorical and literal. It’s why Shaw pulled her off active missions, taking her off ice to do research and reconnaissance instead. She tends to be wild and impulsive as the lit matches she loves, more resistant to assimilation than I’ve ever been. Part of me suspects that the only reason Shaw hasn’t retired her permanently is the grounding effect she has on me.

Sabrina has never really cared about the big picture, never shown much interest in anything beyond the present moment, consequences a vague philosophical idea that happen to other people. I can’t start acting like Sabrina. I am consistent, reliable, effective. It’s what makes me useful. It’s why my handlers over the years, including Shaw, keep waking me up and bringing me back, and they’ve made sure I’ve known this.

I can’t jeopardize this for a rogue asset, no matter who he is, no matter the circumstances that led to my being sent after him.

‘You’re smarter than this’, the voice in my head murmurs. And I am. I am smarter.

I go to take a shower, wash off the questions and the blood. When I turn off the hot water and emerge back in the steam-filled bathroom, I’ve resigned myself. I don’t care who Emmett Faust is or what he’s done, what Mercury has or hasn’t told me. 

The mission is what matters. Faust may have gotten away once, but I won’t let that happen again. And when I get the chance to strike, there will be no coming back from it. 

The next time I see Emmett Faust, I will kill him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all for this week folks! Head's up -- I'll be staggering my posts next week. It'll still be two chapters, but the first will come on Tuesday (12/8), and the second will come on that Thursday (12/10) and will be a lead up to the multi-chapter dump I'll be posting the week after. 
> 
> My plan is to drop that batch in two sets. The first set will be dropped on Tuesday (12/15) and will consist of three chapters, none of them super long. The second will be dropped on that Thursday (12/17) and will be two chapters, about average to what I've been posting. As I've said previously, this is all to preserve the pacing I'm trying to achieve. It should hopefully make sense later, but all these chapters go together, and I think it would drag everything out to do it any other way. 
> 
> The accelerated posting schedule should circumvent this. (Again, I hope!) After this, I'll resume my usual two chapters/Thursday posting schedule. 
> 
> This all probably sounds needlessly complicated. If you suffered through the explanation, good for you! I'll post briefer explanations when it actually happens. At the moment, I'm mostly plotting this out for myself so I don't forget. Thanks for sticking around, I'll see you next week, etc. 
> 
> -Iz


	17. Off-Season

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which both Steve and Emmett encounter unexpected surprises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's December 8th and the promised Tuesday upload is here! As usual, single quotations indicate italics. Have fun, etc. thanks for being here, see you on the other side.

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]

I turn my attention back out the window. I don’t know where we are. We’ve long since abandoned the sprawl of the suburbs outside Detroit for fields and forests white with a snow that increases the further north we get. The touristy billboards have grown more numerous, emblazoned with lighthouses and vineyards and painted sunsets, the 2-D, shiny sell of quaint paradise juxtaposed with the actual cold, dead brown landscape. 

Now, between gaps in the trees, I see the gray flash of Lake Huron, the wind stirring up waves and white peaks of foam. 

“If your idea is blending in, I don’t think it’s going to work this time of year,” I tell him.

Steve pulls off an exit into a deserted tourist town, most of the boutiques and quirky eyesores closed for the season, the streets empty and morose, all the pastel buildings desolate and chilly against the now gray sky. The lake backdrops all of it, a great bleak stretch of nothing that goes on forever right to the edge of the flat horizon. 

He parks around the corner of a gabled bed and breakfast. “Here we are.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I am not,” he says, opening the door. “This will be quick, we’re not staying here.”

“Obviously,” I mutter, getting out after him. “How long until Mercury tracks us here?”

“We’re going to move as quick as possible in hopes of not getting an answer to that question,” Steve says. He loops the go-bag from the backseat over his shoulder, rifling around an outside pocket and pulling out a red, white, and blue mask, which he hands to me. I take it from him as he slams the car door shut.

“Put this on and pull up your hood.”

I comply, if only because this is what I’ve been wanting to do since I left my stolen mask in the F150. It is brutally cold outside, the wind whipping up the empty street in brittle gusts, and though the cold doesn’t touch me, I understand why the sidewalks are empty. 

It’s as good a cover as any. If there isn’t anyone around to see you, you don’t have to bother to try and blend in.

We mount the front steps of the bed and breakfast and Steve opens the door for me. I enter in front of him, into a small front foyer made up of a chandelier and a shiny oak staircase. To our left is a tablecloth-and-pretty-china dining room, to our right a sitting room made of antique furniture, a pianoforte, and porcelain dolls. Steve goes right up to the front desk and rings the bell.

An older woman emerges, a petite and efficient great-aunt type in a paisley-print vest. Her nametag identifies her as Darlene. “How can I help you?”

“I’ve got a room reserved under Eddie Anderson,” he says. “My fiancé told me she already checked in?”

“Oh, yes, she arrived an hour or so ago with her sister. Quite a crew you’ve got going,” Darlene says briskly, glancing over Steve’s shoulder at me.

‘Sister’. Steve had only mentioned one friend, not two. When Darlene brings them up, I get an image of the same red-haired woman from before, Natasha, and a sharp-featured blonde woman I almost recognize, the owner’s own mental image obscured by a knit cap and a mask.

“Yes, this is my nephew,” Steve bluffs easily. “Plans changed and we thought we’d make a family trip out of it.”

On the surface level, the cadence of his voice remains steady, but I detect the slightest note of tension. 

Darlene accepts his answer, bobbing her head affably. “How nice. Not many people come around during the off-season, but there’s plenty still to do if you can handle the cold. And… I’ve got you right here,” she says, tapping through her computer. “Let me grab your other key for you and you can head right up. Dinner is at six in the dining room. It’ll just be me and Harry, but you’re more than welcome to join.”

Steve takes the key with a tight smile and moves swiftly up the stairs. I hurry after him and we emerge on a green-carpeted landing distinguished by a window seat full of embroidered pillows and another porcelain doll.

“Room 4,” Steve tells me, dangling the key so I can see the tag. He moves to open the door, gripping the knife tucked in his jeans, stance wary and ready.

I already know who will be inside. 

I can sense them both, and I’m not sure why. Before this, I’ve needed some sort of audible cue to get an image of anything, person or inanimate object. This time, though, I sense Natasha tensing, pressed to the wall, gun held at the ready, her breathing steady, the well of her thoughts still and deep.

I can see her so much more clearly now: dark red hair in a tangled ponytail, eyes sharp and green as saw-toothed grass, body hard and muscled, her poker face impenetrable and cold. Sitting on the chest at the end of the bed is her so-called sister, apparently relaxed, forearms resting on her knees, gun in its holster. Blonde and sharp featured, I suddenly know her as the person who handed Steve my file.

“It’s us,” Steve calls softly before he pushes the door open.

It swings inward to reveal Sharon sitting where I knew she would be. She looks up at us as we step inside. “Hi, Steve.”

Natasha enters our line of sight, appearing from around the corner, gun still held tight and ready next to her face. She inspects both of us with one clean, efficient flick of her eyes and stuffs the gun into the waistband of her jeans, where it bunches against the fleece pullover she’s wearing.

“You took your sweet time,” she says, going over to the wicker chair next to the window, where she knocks the overabundance of cushions onto the floor before tossing herself down into it.

She lounges with the lithe easiness of a cat, but she isn’t relaxed. I can feel a portion of her attention on me the entire time, though she never quite looks at me, and…there. Underneath her expressionless veneer is a vein of acidic distrust.

I don’t know if I can take her. 

The realization springs into my head apropos of nothing, but it’s there nonetheless, cool and clinical as she is. Physically, she’s no match for me, no normal human could be. Mentally, I don’t stand a chance. Cold assurance pours off of her, and I know the way I know most things now that she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get what she wants.

Her eyes land on me then, as if she knows what I’m thinking, and a smirk curls the corner of her mouth. I look away.

“We had to take an unexpected detour,” Steve explains, moving further into the room. I stay where I am. “Plus, I had to make sure we weren’t followed.”

“Mercury?” Sharon asks.

Natasha snorts from her place in the corner. “Why don’t we just call them Hydra? It’d make this a hell of a lot less complicated.”

“It was Mercury,” Steve confirms, speaking mostly to Sharon. “They caught up with us at the motel. It was only three guys, which makes me think they want to keep this quiet.” He hesitates abruptly and turns on Natasha, gesturing at Sharon. “All right, I can’t take this. What is she doing here?”

“I’d like to know the same thing,” Sharon adds dryly. “I thought I made it perfectly clear that I didn’t want to be involved any further in any of this.”

Natasha tips her head back to the ceiling, heaving a theatrical sigh. “You brought a buddy, I brought a buddy. Simple.”

“No,” Steve says, as close to losing his cool as I’ve yet seen, “Not simple. Nat, we talked about this.” He looks back to Sharon, at a loss. “And you, how’d you let her talk you into this?”

“She didn’t talk me into anything,” Sharon says serenely, eyes flashing. “She kidnapped me.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Don’t be dramatic, I did ‘not’ kidnap you.”

“You do not get to…” Sharon starts, ready to launch into an argument they’ve been in the middle of for months, but then she stops abruptly, remembering that I’m in the room.

“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s obvious you dated.”

Sharon groans and presses a fist to her temple. “Of course it is.” She stands up and levels a finger at Natasha. “I did not sign up for this!”

Natasha flashes a canary-eating grin. “But aren’t you so glad you’re here?”

Sharon lets out a frustrated groan and stalks to the other side of the room, leaning against the wall to fume.

“Stop it, both of you,” Steve says, exhausted. “We don’t have time for this, which I know you know. Emmett, would you come here, please?”

He words it like a request, even though it’s not. I step forward and, already knowing what he wants, lower my hood and pull down the mask.

Natasha looks up at me, still wearing that self-satisfied grin. “Wicked.”

Sharon remains quiet, arms tightly crossed, hemmed in and trapped. She’s not scared of me, exactly, she’s scared of very little, but she doesn’t want to be any closer to me and her stomach turns at the thought of looking at me.

My chest tightens when I understand this. I’m not surprised, though, and I can’t blame her. I expect repulsion is the whole point of me.

“You have any idea how Hydra knew where to find you?” Natasha asks, distracting me. 

“I didn’t give them a call if that’s what you want to know,” I toss back.

“Excuse me if I’m hesitant to believe you,” she says in a would-be light voice, “This could all be an elaborate ruse. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Unfortunately, the assassin sent to kill me neglected to read me in before they tried to gut me,” I say.

She screws up her nose with aggressive irony. “Cute. But pitch-perfect delivery doesn’t mean you’re telling the truth.” 

“He hasn’t lied to me so far,” Steve says.

“He has definitely lied to you, Stephen,” Natasha responds, pushing herself to her feet. “I know the type. Lies all the time. Can’t help it. Isn’t that right, Emmett?”

“I lie about a lot,” I reply stiffly as she approaches me. “Lots of times it kept me alive, but no one ever bothered to train me in it or paid me to do it. It was never my… ‘job’.”

She narrows her eyes at this jibe, green eyes lethal.

Steve watches this exchange warily, as if afraid we’ll drop the guise of civility and start ninja-kicking each other. I don’t intend to start the fight and neither does Natasha. Somewhere someone taught her what my grandma taught me – know when to show your hand. This isn’t the time and place, and we both know it.

“So?” I ask. “If I’m not feeding them my location, what’s the theory on how they’re tracking me?”

“It’s her theory,” Natasha says, jerking her chin toward where Sharon stands. “She tends to be a little more open-minded and trusting than I do.”

Sharon’s lips purse at this but she continues looking out the window and doesn’t say anything.

Natasha pulls out a rectangular piece of technology, slim and silver, the screen taking up the entire front part of the device. “She thinks they planted a tracker in you.”

“No,” I say immediately. “I’d feel it.”

There are no new scars on my body that I can see or feel. In fact, all the scars I had previous to when Mercury took me have been erased. The shiny scar on my palm from where I’d fallen onto the stove as a toddler, when my grandma and I made oatmeal. The white line from where a broken bottle sliced my arm open the first time I pissed off the wrong asshole and got jumped. The cut through my eyebrow, courtesy of Brenden, where the hair never grew back again. Little pieces and parts of who I was wiped away easy as marks from a chalkboard.

“Your hair,” she says, “What did it look like before?”

I shrug, not following her line of thought and resenting the interrogation. “I don’t know. About the same. Darker, maybe. And longer.”

“Wonder who’s been cutting it for thirty years.”

I curl my lip, unamused. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“Feel along the base of your skull.”

I tense up. The voice, dormant thus far, returns, running parallel to the current of my own thoughts, almost undetectable. ‘She doesn’t get to tell you what to do’. 

Steve sees my reaction and says, “I trust her.” 

Again, that tone, the cajoling, coaxing, careful-he’s-fragile tone, like I’m an abused dog or one of the B and B’s ugly porcelain dolls.

“In my experience, you tend to trust people who don’t deserve it,” I retort. The coy, infuriating smile doesn’t leave Natasha’s face, but my words land, hitting the Achille’s heel she’s so careful to conceal.

“She’d have no problem snapping my neck right here,” I continue coolly.

“It would solve a number of problems,” she rebuffs, all pleasant venom.

This is her go-to style of comportment, I know. And I love that I know. This woman has a sort of power over others, an ability to see through them. Well, so do I.

“We’re acting like enemies,” Steve inserts, in that black-and-white way he has. “That’s not going to help us, any of us. Emmett. Please.”

“Fine.” I reach up and probe with my fingers, finding a hard, round lump beneath my skin at the base of my skull, about the shape and size of a sunflower seed. The moment I touch it a shock jolts my brain, whiting out my vision. “Ow! Fuck.”

I yank my hand away, mouth dry and heart racing. How had I not known? “It’s a tracker.” 

“And more, probably,” Natasha says. “It might store data or act as an electric shock collar or any other number of nasty things.”

“Nat,” Sharon says softly. “You’re scaring him.”

My voice is brittle and sharp as broken glass. “I’m not scared.” I’m lying.

“You should be,” Natasha says, knowing I’m lying and reveling in it. “I asked about your hair because if the device were inserted recently, whoever did it would likely shave your head prior to surgery. It’s standard procedure.”

“I’ve seen ‘General Hospital’,” I manage. “I know that. You’re saying they just did this.”

“That’d be my educated guess.”

“How do I know that you’re not bullshitting me? If this is a tracker, how come Mercury didn’t get to me right away, at the impound lot or at the motel?”

Natasha’s brow furrows, animosity cooled as she considers the question. “We’re not sure. Their ability to find you at all supports the theory that it ‘is’ a tracker. Why it took so long…right now, the theory is twofold. First: that Mercury wasn’t prepared for a breech like this. The lab in Detroit is for all intents and purposes a smokescreen, a front, a way to keep the activists and nosy government officials and people like us off their scent and hide all the interesting, nonethical shit they’re doing. That means that they don’t have the resources at the lab to respond appropriately to this kind of worst-case scenario, which means that their response team had to be scrambled from a different, unidentified location, which takes longer. Combine that with the confusion at the scene, and you’ve got it.

“Second: the tranquilizer Steve gave you at the lot slows your heartbeat and breath down to almost nil. If the implant reads life-signs, it may have thought you were dead, sent out a final ping on your location, and shut down, turning back on again and transmitting your location when you woke up. That option includes a lot of other unknown variables, though.” 

“We don’t have time for this,” Sharon says agitatedly.

“If you have a better solution, let me know,” Natasha replies, powering up the device she holds before tapping at the screen. “We’re able to speculate about this implant – and now, if you cooperate – confirm what we think we’ve figured out about it, because of intelligence we stole from Hydra back in S.H.I.E.L.D days. Steve?”

He takes the device and glances over the image displayed on it, distaste flickering briefly behind his eyes. Then, with reluctance, he hands it to me while Natasha keeps talking.

“What we’re talking about here is old, well-established tech. We’ve seen it in Hydra agents and affiliated organizations for decades, pretty much since the Cold War.”

I’m looking at some sort of medical diagram for the human skull. My thumb brushes over the screen and the diagram slides away, replaced by pictures depicting the inside of a human head. It is less an anatomical study than a crime scene shot. The brain in question has been blackened, burnt. 

“Most in-field encounters with agents outfitted with this device ended in self-termination,” she continues. “Apparently plain old cyanide capsules stopped being sexy. Point is, we’ve never been able to get a close look at it beyond the specs you’re looking at, but S.H.I.E.L.D has been working on finding a way to neutralize it nearly as long as Hydra has been trying to perfect it.”

I can’t tear my eyes from the image of the fried brain, reminiscent of all my old bad dreams about the electric chair. What I’m looking at is brutal, efficient, and inelegant. I don’t need Natasha to tell me to know that this is Mercury’s work. Numbly, I flip back to the diagram, wondering if the person who attacked me at the motel has the same sort of thing implanted in their skull. The slight, sharp tug in my gut says that they do.

“Get it out,” I say flatly, handing the device back to Steve. 

“I can’t,” she says, after a beat. “It’s wired to your spinal cord.”

“Then what use are you?” I snap.

The silence that follows this outburst is embarrassed and hyperaware, full of adult knowing. It’s carried mostly by Steve and Sharon, who avert their gazes from me, like I’m the oblivious guest at an upper-crust dinner party. Natasha lets the discomfort linger before she speaks again.

“The world’s top brain surgeon couldn’t remove it,” she says with pointed civility. “I do, however, have the ability to disable it. Before it all went to shit, someone at S.H.I.E.L.D came up with a prototype that’ll probably work.”

“Probably?”

“Like I said, there hasn’t been an opportunity to test it outside the lab.”

I consider this. “How would you do it?”

“Press a button,” Natasha says, retrieving a black duffle bag from where it sits on the end of the bed. “All you have to do is hold still.”

She unzips the bag, pulling out a second device that looks like a mix between a phone and a remote control, raising an eyebrow at me. “Essentially, it fries the implant before the implant fries you. I’m told that if it works as designed, you’ll feel something similar to a static-electric shock. Unpleasant, but not harmful.”

I frown at the device, resisting the urge to take a step back. I can’t really tell how much of what she’s said is true. Like any skilled liar, she interweaves falsehood and honesty, braiding them together so tightly you can’t make out one from the other when they leave her mouth.

Steve and Sharon’s response provides the only way to evaluate the risk. Steve believes what Natasha has said thus far, confidence built on years of having one another’s backs. Sharon has supplied a part of the information Natasha has just told me, according to Natasha at least, but the mingling of distaste and resignation in the twist of Sharon’s mouth confirms for me that what I’ve heard is, for the most part, fact.

If they wanted to ambush me or catch me unaware, this would be the best way to do it. I can believe it of Natasha, but if Steve wanted to immobilize me or hurt me, he’s had plenty of time to do it already. His whole shtick is building trust. Plus, if this is a tracker, then it would be in their best interest also to disable it.

Underlying this logical train of thought is the visceral, suffocating need to get it ‘out’. I’ve known on some level that Mercury has had thirty years to take me apart and put me back together again, but I haven’t been able to think through the implications of this. 

The implant confirms that not only could they have toyed with my mind and my body, they did, and they crafted a blind spot in my awareness so that I can detect so much about other people and still miss this one crucial detail about myself.

I probably won’t ever know everything they did to me, but I can fix this.

“Fine,” I say. “Do it.”

“All right. Let’s make this quick.” She steps up to me and clicks on the device, close enough I can smell the nutmeg undertones of the perfume she’s wearing. The device hums in her hand.

I know what she’s going to do before she does it. I could’ve snapped my arm up to stop her, but I keep my hands pinned to my sides.

Now that I’m aware of it, I can feel the implant buzzing at the base of my brain. I feel victimized and violated and exposed and I have to focus on keeping myself still, or I will shake.

“Deep, even breaths,” Natasha says with sardonic aplomb, and holds the device up against the back of my neck. I anticipate the jolt a second before I feel it. All my muscles go slack at once and I fall to my knees right before I black out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, y'all. Thanks for sticking with me for this limited edition Tuesday upload. As I mentioned last week, I'm still posting two chapters this week, just staggered out a bit. The first chapter is today, hope you liked it, and the second chapter will come on Thursday. 
> 
> So, I'll see you then, and clue you in next time to the weirdness that will be 'next' week's upload schedule. I mentioned it in my end notes last week, so if you don't remember and are dying to know, refer back to chapter 16. 
> 
> I guess that's all for now, folks. See you soon!
> 
> -Iz


	18. Relics of Bad Science Past Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our resident antagonist steps to the edge of a startling discovery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: brief misgendering, allusion to underage sex, brief mention of homophobic language 
> 
> As always, single quotations=italics.

[Elián Castillo aka the Hunter (OC) POV]

When I get back to my room from the shower, I find Shaw standing by my window, paging through one of my books.

“Where’d you get this?” she asks.

“I found it.”

I hang up my damp towel, keeping my movements slow and easy, like I’m not scared of her. 

She raises a regal eyebrow. “I keep telling maintenance to clean this place out. Or at least put better locks on the doors.”

“We were designed to ignore locks,” I tell her, “And to break them.”

“You ‘were’ designed to ignore locks. I’m not responsible for that flaw,” Shaw muses. “In this equation, I’m the Obama administration left to clean up GW’s mess. Bring order back. Be blamed for the doomed economy.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

She glances at me, annoyance creasing her magenta lipstick. “What happened?”

Faust’s grin flashes back into my head, an inverse to the frown in Shaw’s mouth. Fierce delight versus irradiated displeasure. I take the feeling I had then, Faust pinned under my knee, adrenaline and something wilder buzzing in my fingers and singing in my head and compare it to what withers in my chest right now. 

I feel incredibly small, vulnerable in the only way I ever will be. If I released the fists clenched at my sides, there would be a tremor in my hands. 

“I lingered, Ma’am. It’s my fault he got away.”

“I know it’s your fault,” Shaw snaps, dark eyes flashing. “I understand ‘perfectly’ that it is your fault. This is what happens when you use unstable boys for your blueprint. They can’t help playing with their food.”

“I’m not…”

“Don’t talk back to me, Elián. I expect that from Sabrina, not from you.” I remain silent. Shaw taps the spine of my book against her palm, her gaze flinty. “Where is she, anyway? Off flouting my authority, I presume.”

“I…I don’t know, Ma’am. She didn’t tell me.”

“You’re a poor liar,” she tells me, dismissive, turning her attention back to the book cover, already fed-up with me and the mess I’ve made. “Here is what I’ve been led to understand about your role in this debacle. You went after the primary target before identifying the secondary target, as I explicitly asked you to do. Is that correct?”

I try not to shift, the hard tenor of her voice claustrophobic, pinning me in place and leaving no room for protest.

She speaks before I can respond. “Look at me in the face when I’m speaking to you. Is that correct?”

“The primary target fled before we were able to identify the secondary target.”

“You say that to me, and all I hear is that you failed in your approach. Now, I will ask you again, and I advise you not to make me repeat myself. Is it correct that you went after the primary target before identifying the person with him?”

I could tell her that lackluster intel was responsible for my failed approach. How could I know how to sneak up on Emmett Faust if I hadn’t been briefed on the extent of his extrasensory abilities? Mercury made him, same as they made me. They had to have filing cabinets full of files inches thick all about him, about who he is and what he can do. Unless, of course, Mercury lost those in the breach, which they – and by proxy, Shaw – would never admit. 

Normally, I would push back, never willing to take blame that isn’t mine, but I remember what Sabrina said to me: ‘When Shaw comes by, don’t press her about it.’ So I don’t mount any of the protests ringing in my head.

That’s a way to get sent directly to assimilation. 

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Despite this misstep,” she continues, soft and dangerous, “You managed to apprehend Faust behind the motel, where an altercation occurred. Remind me of Faust’s status, Elián.”

“He is unassimilated,” I repeat back to her, the words verbatim from the briefing this morning, “He is untrained. He is a failed prototype, unfit to see daylight. Though we can expect him to be vicious and unpredictable, these attributes do not outweigh the first listed. Any graduate of Project Endeavor is more than fit to neutralize the threat he presents.”

“Very good,” Shaw says dryly. “If only your actions were as impressive as your memory. I ask you again. Give me the whole truth. What happened?”

“I had him,” I say, and then falter.

“Tell me if this sounds right to you,” Shaw inserts, taking a leisurely step toward me. “You had him pinned under your paw and instead of shaking him there and then until his neck snapped from the whiplash, you pulled out that ridiculous knife for which you have such fondness, and before you gutted him, which would’ve left both blood and entrails for the clean-up crew to attend, you taunted him. And the target, who is not your usual fare of field mice and quivering bunnies, but vermin akin to a wild dog, bit back. Hard.”

I remain quiet.

The cut of Shaw’s gaze is sharp and precise as a scalpel. “You do not treat other predators the way you treat prey. How many times have I told you this?”

“Enough,” I murmur.

“More than enough,” she corrects. “I expected better from you, which is why you’ve been replaced.”

I look up, startled. The curve of Shaw’s smile is exact and amused. She continues, nonchalant, “This was not my call, but when asked by the director, I supported the move whole-heartedly. What other choice was I given? My remaining in-field asset, his skills already in doubt, failed to produce a result.”

She wants me to ask, and so I do. “Who are they sending?”

“The Black Ops team,” Shaw replies, savoring my revulsion. 

“Blunt force,” I murmur, the words mealy in my mouth. “They’ll swing twelve people and heavy artillery like they’re a barbed wire bat, beat the problem until it stops twitching.”

“It doesn’t fit your aesthetic, I know,” Shaw says derisively. “You prefer melodrama and symbolism and intestinal matter, much to your own detriment.” 

I let this barb hook in my skin without flinching. “It won’t work.”

I meet her gaze, finally, which is what she’s been waiting for. She stands with easy grace, out of sequence against the backdrop of the Dorms, her shoulder pads and sharp baby pink stilettos as easy going down as antifreeze, her hair bright as sun on snow, every line in place, silhouette unwasted and theatrical as the clean drop of a guillotine. 

“I know it won’t work,” she says, examining her lilac acrylics with artistic ennui. “I’m counting on it.”

I’m getting a second chance. That’s what this means. 

I can’t quite untangle the uptick in my pulse, whether I was or was not relieved to have this responsibility confiscated from me and then returned quick as whiplash. 

The point, though. The point is if Shaw’s calculation is correct, and it always is, Emmett Faust is still mine to kill. 

“They’re on track to breach in a matter of minutes,” Shaw adds, pulling her watch out of her blazer’s front pocket. It ticks, Victorian and silver, at the end of its chain. “I expect the director to contact me with news of their failure shortly afterwards. You should be ready to be sent out tomorrow morning, early. The tracking signal is already dead, which I expected sooner, honestly. This presents a difficulty only you are suited to circumvent. Faust and Rogers will be gone, but they won’t have gone far, and you will be in an advantageous position to track them. This time, there will be no…lingering. Kill him, and then go about your performance art. Understand?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Good.” She steps past me and toward the door. “When you see Sabrina, tell her to report directly to assimilation in the morning, or I’ll have Monica’s little lackey put her back on ice faster than she can strike a match.”

“I’ll convey the message.” 

Something in my tone must betray a lack of lapdog obedience because she laughs, the white of her teeth glinting in the low light.

“You are precocious, aren’t you, under all that cowering? I always forget.”

I hold still as she comes closer, already backed into the corner, and try not to breathe or twitch or clench my eyes shut. My lungs fill with the sweet lacy smell of her perfume, and it’s like all my dreams of drowning. She touches my face with the back of her hand and leaves it there, no doubt feeling my pulse flicker under her fingers. 

“You can keep your little freedoms,” she says, so soft anyone else wouldn’t hear her. “You can even pretend they are rebellions, if it makes you feel better. But you will always be seen, and if for a second you think I don’t hear the psychotic hamster in your brain spinning frantically on its little wheel, I would disavow yourself of that notion, and quickly.”

She steps back, tapping my book lightly against my chest. “I let you and Sabrina conspire, have your two-man team huddles. But I want to take her away for good, and I want to wipe your incorrigible mind clean with the push of a button, and I will do it one day, as soon as you show me I should. Yes?”

She uses the book to push off of me, her smile the sort of icy offense usually doled out by congresspeople and beauty queens. Once again she inspects the cover, the brutally young man gazing out from it, his hands in his pockets, his quiet gaze solemn and resigned. 

“I’ll be taking this with me,” she says, tucking it away in an interior pocket, “For obvious reasons.”

Then she leaves. I wait for the click of her heels to fully retreat down the hall, three minutes more for the click of the front door’s lock engaging. Then I go over to my nightstand, pick up the other two books I’ve managed to scavenge.

She took my favorite, and I’d be naïve to think she didn’t know it, the book dog-eared and soft with all the times I’ve read it, often the only entertainment I have in the occasionally onerous stretch between missions. 

It was an older book, older than I should be, about a boarding school and schoolboy jealousy and war. I try not to linger on the loss, casting my mind back instead to what Sabrina said to me before she left.

Outside my window, the sky has grown steadily darker. 

I take my books with me and retreat down to Sabrina’s chosen residence: the cavernous, damp maze of the Dorm’s basement.

***

The door to the basement creaks open, releasing a puff of chilly dank breath, the stairwell yawning and pitch black as a throat. I flip on the camp lantern I brought with me, the lightbulb at the foot of the stairs long-since burnt out and start my descent.

Like the rest of the Dorms, the basement is makeshift storage, seeming miles of army green shelving stretching in every direction, the contents thick with dust, spotted with mildew, or gnawed through by the ever-persistent mice. Industrial fluorescent lighting spans the whole of the place, but sometime in the last two decades, the bulbs stopped being replaced and now a third to half of the lights don’t work, the rest flickering and full of dead ladybugs and flies.

My footsteps echo against the concrete floor, and the sweep of the lantern light over the looming shelves seems to have its own sound. The basement doesn’t scare me so much as it awes me, a testament to the length and width people will go to forget. The stuff down here has been phased out, gone out of favor, been shuffled from one closet to another until it was sent here to molder and die.

I’ve found so much shit down here. Boxes full of books. Magazines. Old newspapers. Obsolete tech. Chairs and desks and chalkboards and rusted bedsprings and children’s toys. Phased out uniforms. Bizarre equipment. Boxes full of pens with the old Mercury logo, more boxes with notepads and lanyards. Whole shelves full of women’s professional clothes from the late 1970s, tapered waists and swishy skirts and bootleg-cut dress pants swaddled in plastic garment bags. 

I pass old combat boots on a high up shelf, leather worn at the toes, display cases full of medallions, commendation plaques for bravery in the field and bureaucratic loyalty stacked three-deep. 

When I get bored, this is where I come. Technically Sabrina and I are not supposed to be down here, regulated to the upper levels of the Dorms, but no one cares enough to stop us. We’re kith and kin to all this junk anyway. Most of Mercury stopped thinking about it the moment the janitorial staff off-loaded it down here. Same with us. The only things of any danger or use ‘are’ us, and we’re contained and made harmless as soon as the Dorm doors lock behind us. The rest of the time, we’re on ice.

I locate Sabrina by memory, zigzagging through a mental map of lefts and rights and so-many number of footsteps until I draw close to her hidey-hole, in the far back corner of the vast room. The soft multicolor glow of Christmas lights blooms ahead of me in the dark, and I switch off the lantern. 

“Welcome,” she says in a faux-spooky voice, syllables ricocheting off the ceiling. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The hidey-hole is a tiny would-be room, made out of already-here shelving, the third wall formed out of stacked desks and other paraphernalia. An actual doorframe leans against the whole precarious mess and as I approach, it swings open.

I find Sabrina perched on the camp bed, surrounded by the cheap framed posters and prints and actual semi-valuable paintings stacked and propped and hung upside down along the shelving units and the makeshift wall, covering up all the gaps. The Christmas lights are strung and tangled through all of this, the final touch a plastic 3-foot-tall Santa glowing serenely in the corner with his mittened hands outstretched, meant to hold a bowl of candy canes or some other form of holiday cheer. Instead, he holds a trashcan with a fire flickering merrily inside. The tinsel shag Sabrina has wound around his neck like a scarf (or potentially a noose) dangles dangerously close to the open flame. I don’t think I’m imagining the fear in the black plastic pits of Santa’s eyes.

“Hi,” I say, stepping in and closing the door gently behind me. “Shaw says you need to report to assimilation tomorrow morning ASAP.”

“Is that what she says?” Sabrina says, unimpressed. “And let me guess, if I don’t, she’ll put me back on ice and never wake me up again. Same old, same old. I remember when her threats were visceral and exciting. Still miss that left-back molar.”

“Look, I know your thing is like, giving Shaw a hard time, but maybe it’d be worth considering…I don’t know. Lightening up a bit.”

She raises an eyebrow and tears out a page of the magazine spread across her knees, balling it up before she lobs it into the trashcan. The fire accepts the offering, flames hitching briefly upward, crackling greedily.

“How long was she here?”

“I don’t know. Five minutes,” I grumble, already knowing where this is going. “Can we not do this, please?”

“Oh ho. Do you not want to discuss your mommy issues with me right now?”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that term.”

“I’ll stop,” she agrees amiably, “As soon as you grow a spine and stop wetting your pants every time she enters a room.”

“You’re exaggerating,” I mutter.

“I know. That’s the point. It’s for effect. In the biz, we call it hyperbole.”

“Well, I’m down here. Are you going to tell me why you were acting so bizarre earlier?”

“Fine, fine. Touchy,” Sabrina says, grinning up at me. 

Without further ceremony, she pulls out a fire extinguisher from behind her bed, stands up, and puts out the trashcan fire in a geyser of foam, flecking Santa’s fear-filled face.

“All right,” she says, tossing the extinguisher back in the corner before brushing her hands off on her pants. “This calls for a field trip.”

“Of course it does,” I gripe, flicking the lantern back on.

She exits the hidey-hole with a flourish, and I trail behind her as we wind back through the basement, Sabrina humming to herself in perfect pitch. Abruptly, she stops, throwing an arm out and clotheslining me to keep me from running into her.

“Here we are,” she sings, and sashays down an apparently unremarkable aisle. 

I watch as she crouches down about halfway up it, a single working fluorescent light spotlighting her. She begins pulling boxes off the bottom shelf with heavy mechanical thuds.

“Typewriters,” she grunts.

“I didn’t ask.”

“Hm-hmm,” she hums, undeterred by my lack of enthusiasm. “‘Here’ we go. Hey, would you mind…two aisles down to the right, there’s like an old tv on a cart, has a VHS player on its bottom shelf. Can you grab it?”

“This better be worth it.”

Half of her body disappears as she crawls through the hole she’s opened up. Her voice goes muffled, still gleeful and sing-song-y. “Trust me it will be.”

Following her directions, I find the television, caked an inch thick with dust and cord trailed over the floor like a tail. I wind the cord up and roll it back. When I return to the aisle, Sabrina has completely vanished, save her socked feet.

“Cute.”

“Enjoy the view while you can, sport,” she says, shimmying back out ass-first, head and shoulders snowed with gray, tugging a box after her. Sharpie scrawled on the lid declares ‘For Kathy’. In different handwriting underneath, handwriting I recognize as Sabrina’s, it says, ‘PE 90-91? HC’. PE as in Project Endeavor. As in the project that rebirthed us.

“Where did you get that?” I demand.

She sits back on her heels, brushing off dust and basement sediment, casual. “How do you think, dumbass? I found it.”

“That shouldn’t be here.”

“Duh.” She stands, propping the box on her hip. “If all you’re going to do is state the obvious, don’t.”

“Where did it come from?” I ask, remembering what Shaw said to me about hamster wheels and always being seen.

“Remember when C Building flooded? What was it? Seven years ago, has to be,” she says, slipping past me and heading back to the hidey-hole. I hurry after her, pushing the tv cart in front of me, the wheels rattling over the concrete. “Anyway, they moved all the shit from there to here. It was supposed to just be until they sucked up all the water and got it dried out again, but then some puff-chest ops guy wanted to use it for training or something I don’t know maybe to put more big-boy guns. And so, long story short, none of it ended back where it was supposed to be, we were both asleep at the time, and everyone forgot about it. You know. Bureaucracy.” 

“Wait, there’s more of this?” I ask.

She snorts. “Yeah. They stuffed an entire back aisle full, stacked eight-ish high. It was a bitch to dig through, but I am nothing if not dedicated to figuring out stuff no one wants me to know. A good third of it was water damaged, though. Mice have gotten to most of it, too.”

“And you found this…when?”

“I don’t know. Last time Shaw woke me up.”

“Three years ago, then.”

“Yeah, that sounds right. Haven’t had a chance until now to do more than glance at it.”

We arrive back at the hidey-hole. Sabrina deposits the box on the bed and then helps me lift the cart over the edge of the doorframe. With the tv inside, the hidey-hole is even more cramped and crowded than usual. I find the extension cord to which the Christmas lights are attached and plug the tv in the second outlet.

She hops back on the bed and sits crisscross, popping the lid off the box. “Anyway. Like I said, I’ve only glanced through all of it, enough to know that there’s shit in here that concerns your boy. Look, see.”

“He’s not my boy,” I say grudgingly, crawling up onto the bed next to her.

“Sure,” she says, and hands me a file. 

I take it and flip it open. The top page is a yellowing form watermarked with the Mercury logo, two snakes intertwined around a staff, the original Roman god’s caduceus. Paperclipped in the upper right corner is a three-by-five photo of Emmett Faust, his skin gray, his lips blue and slightly parted with sleep. 

He looks almost peaceful like that, which is exactly like him. Being put under, put on ice, is not a fucking winter vacation. Every time, it is painful and bitter, clenched jaw and raised veins, despite all the doctor’s cool intonations urging you to relax, that’ll make it all easier, just count down from ten.

It is fucking scary, is what it is, and when you do finally slip under, you do it alone. More than once I’ve stared at the dark ceiling of my room while trying to fall asleep and thought about how that must be what dying is like, judging from how much the only thing I want in the second before I go is for someone to be holding my hand.

In that moment, I don’t have the self-control to keep from envisioning a specific hand gripping mine. That moment is the only moment where I slip and let myself remember warm fingers wrapped around my own, her presence acting as a sort of homing beacon, a light on a faraway shore in the midst of a cold dark.

So I look down at this picture of Emmett Faust, sleeping peacefully, and I resent him. Hostility is a dry heat in my chest.

“What is all this, anyway?” I ask. “Records of his time in internment?”

Sabrina pokes around the box, brow furrowed. “From what I’ve seen…yes? It’s all a bit of a mishmash, honestly, like the contents of someone’s office dumped in a box. This guy.”

She plucks a picture frame out from the bottom of the pile, folders and envelopes and binders bulging and shifting and threatening to spill their contents. She shows me the picture in the frame before she starts the process of prying it loose, fiddling with the little metal clasps holding it in place, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth.

The image is of a man, a woman, and a child. I know the way I know everything that the man loved the woman and the child the best way he could. His neat beard and his kind eyes and the creased line of his jeans irk me, because I know, despite never coming face to face with him, exactly who he is.

“Stephen J. Lyons,” Sabrina reads, “His wife, Kathy, and their son, Jason.” She has succeeded in freeing the picture, along with a newspaper clipping. “It was taken at a church picnic.”

“Of course it fucking was,” I mutter.

She grins at me. “You’re so much more fun when you’re pissed off.”

“I’m not pissed off.”

“Liar,” she says, unruffled. “You’re getting what I’m getting though, right?”

“Yeah. Obviously.”

Stephen J. Lyons, vice president in charge of research and development at Mercury, went to church and loved his wife and was the first to head up Project Endeavor.

One thing I have always believed and will always believe is that people are not, in fact, complicated. The truth of human nature is not paradoxical, not strange. A man can be a good, White, clean-cut member of his community and also a bureaucrat who entertained and then approved and then oversaw a proposal for recruiting and enhancing violent criminals for the purpose of strong-arming corporate and government will in his company’s favor. It is simple. It makes sense.

It’s only those who have swallowed a lie of essential suburban good and capitalist niceties who struggle to believe this. I’ve known it since I was a kid.

I don’t blame Stephen J. Lyons. I hold no grudge against him. I am, after all, a product of that same truth of human nature. I did, after all, choose this for myself.

What I resent is his ability to get away with it. That’s something I never fucking got, never fucking deserved. He didn’t deserve it, either, and he got it anyway. Even though he's dead and gone, his legacy is preserved. To the outside world, he will always be the man photographed at his church picnic. To the outside world, he will never be seen as a monster. Not so with me, or Sabrina, or even Emmett Faust. If the public ever thinks of us, stumbles upon our atrocities while scanning through old news articles, it will be with disgust, and loathing. As it should be. That is the right order of things.

None of us deserve to be forgiven. None of us deserve to have families or fucking church picnics. So why did Lyons get it while none of the rest of us did? Pawns to his chess master, I suppose, and nothing is ever fair.

“All right, so this is his shit,” Sabrina says, studying Lyons’ glossy family. “Good to know. Wonder how it ended up in Building C.”

“Died in a car accident,” I tell her. “Someone must’ve had his desk cleaned out and sent over.”

“Wow, you’re good,” she says, open admiration in her voice. “Pity I didn’t get my brain into the super-soup until it was already almost fully developed.”

“No, I know that because I caused the car accident.”

“Oh. Wife and kid?”

“Wife, driving. Kid with her sister.”

Sabrina’s mouth twitches with neutral understanding. “Hm. You have any idea why?”

She means why Mercury wanted him dead. 

“Poetic justice, I guess,” I say, reaching back into the box. “He made some other rich White asshole’s life inconvenient and I was the result.”

“Fair enough,” she says. “Circle of life. Yada, yada. God, I thought this would be more interesting.”

“We’re the only interesting things to come out of any of this.”

She cackles and yanks a manila folder from the midst of the mess, flipping it open. “Oh, here we go. Emmett fucking Faust. Found you.”

“You said his name earlier like you knew him,” I say, “Or knew of him.”

“Baby,” she says, “Sweet baby child. How old were you in 1989?” 

“Four.”

“Then it makes sense you wouldn’t remember,” she says. “And Mercury took you young, so I’m not surprised you never found out.”

“Found out what?” I demand, slipping Faust’s picture out from under the paperclip. “Who is this guy?”

In answer, she hands me a stack of photographs emptied out of a soft, fat envelope jammed in the middle of the file open in her lap. Crime scene photos. Or, they should be crime scene photos, but they’ve clearly been taken by a personal camera, the shots sometimes blurry or with a finger obscuring a corner in a fleshy smudge.

I shuffle through them. The first series features a man and a woman, both dead, both stabbed in what appears to be an abandoned house. The second series features a woman and a child, the child no older than six, also stabbed, the child stuffed in his own toybox, the mother bled out on the linoleum of a kitchen floor. The last features an elderly couple also in their home, the wife’s eyes removed.

“He did this,” I say. “So what? You’ve got a higher body count than he does.”

“Allegedly,” Sabrina says airily, taking the photos back from me. “He’s famous, Ellie. Like famous, famous. They called him the Bedford Butcher. There’s been books about him, movies on Lifetime, song lyrics, TIME covers, the whole thing.”

“Why would Mercury try and recruit him?” I wonder. “He’s so…visible. And obvious.”

“Why did Icarus fly too close to the sun?” Sabrina asks rhetorically. “Hubris, that’s what. These motherfuckers were high on that age-old concoction, corporate macho money and greed. Remember, this is before everything went to shit, way before, back when everything they touched turned to gold. I think Faust was the first, too. They wanted a prime specimen. Who better than him? I mean, think about it. Aside from the whole infamous thing, which these fucking bastards liked anyway, he checks all their boxes.”

She’s right. He was young, according to the statistics now in my lap, barely eighteen when Mercury got their hands on him. He was violent. His brain didn’t work quite right, its ability to function lost somewhere between his grandmother’s 1981 death in a trailer park in Melvindale and an abandoned house in Bedford eight years later.

“What happened to him?” I ask. “I mean, why did he fail?”

I look over to see Sabrina chewing on her bottom lip, expression thoughtful.

“That’s the thing. I don’t think he was a failure.”

“Yeah? What’re you thinking?”

“I’m not sure,” she murmurs. “I’ve almost got it. There's a 'reason' somebody decided to let him loose. The answer’s just…” She knocks her knuckles against her forehead, releasing a frustrated groan.

“Let’s find out, then,” I say diplomatically, which makes her roll her eyes. “Also. Off-topic. Why’d you make me haul that rickety-ass tv back here?”

“Ooh. I almost forgot. Home movies,” she says, rummaging in the box and pulling out one and then two and then three VHS tapes in plain cardboard sleeves. She shoves one into my hands. “Feel the sizzle on those puppies.”

I almost drop it, the sensation exact and intense as a burn. “He was not supposed to have these.”

“Dope, huh?” Sabrina says happily. “Might be why corporate had you off him.”

“What is that?” I mutter, picking the tape up again, involuntarily wincing at the feeling. “It’s not…shame. It’s blatant. Like a challenge, almost.”

“Very masculine,” she observes.

“Revenge,” I realize, voice pitching upward.

She puts a finger to the side of her nose, winking, her grin wide and wicked. “They’ve got it.”

“Should we watch these now?” I ask, sliding the tape out into my hand.

“Nah,” she says, stacking the other two by her knee. “Save it for the grand finale. We need context first, rookie.”

So we spend the next three hours parsing through the contents of the box, piles growing in every spare inch of floor and bed not already occupied by Sabrina or me or ancient televisions or traumatized Santas. At some point, Sabrina leaves and comes back with a pot of coffee from the kitchen upstairs and a bowl of burnt microwave popcorn. I migrate from the bed to the floor. Sabrina props herself up in the corner in a yoga pose, braid wrapped up in a bun and stuck through with a Mercury-logo pen.

Slowly, a timeline begins to unravel itself.

First: what is known and documented regarding Faust’s early life, which isn’t much. He drops off the map 1981, vanishing from foster care with nary a paper trail. He doesn’t pop back up again until 1986, when he is arrested for petty theft, dropped in a group home, and sentenced to community service, where he disappears again until the afternoon in Bedford. 

Details appear in the margins of these years, scant. The stuff Mercury chose to document is dry, factual. Mother dead in a car crash at two. Gambling addict for a grandfather. No dad on his birth certificate. Sexual deviant. I pause at this.

“Deviant,” I say. “This means what I think it fucking means, doesn’t it?”

“Not quite,” Sabrina says, squinting down at the piece of paper in her hand. “What’s your thing say?”

“Sexual deviant, colon, documented homosexual tendencies,” I read, letting the disgust at this choice of words seep into my voice. “Fuckers. What’s your thing say?”

“According to my thing,” she flourishes said thing and squints, “Uh…he visited a non-profit clinic pretty regularly in ’88 and ‘89 including the day when the first set of murders – the old people, the McLarens – occurred, which is why he wasn’t charged for that set, and. Oh shit.” 

“What? Spit it out.”

“Cool it, hotshot,” she mutters. “I’m getting there. He claimed an alibi for the second set too, but that fell through. The guy he said he was with, a slimy piece of work named Norman Mulligan, wouldn’t cop to him being there. Um. Because Faust was a minor at the time, and the guy in question was…allegedly…giving him food, money, a place to sleep, in exchange for sex. It says here that Faust asserted this was a regular arrangement.”

My stomach sinks. “Was it?”

“Probably,” Sabrina says, “But if I were in a tight spot, me being somewhere I sometimes am is a half-truth I’d tell.”

As the resident pathological liar, she has the authority to say this. Quiet settles as we consider this information. Sabrina grabs a handful of popcorn. I sip my tepid coffee. We dive back into our respective piles. The timeline continues to unfold.

Second in the line-up: the murders themselves. These are reconstructed in a frankly boring series of reports, from medical examiners and crime-scene experts and psychologists. How the victims died. What it meant. Why he did it. That he did it is beyond question, the proof overwhelming, Faust’s alibis a poor attempt to cover his own ass, but what can you expect? Or so the experts concur, in tedious jargon and academic condescension that makes me want to drive my pen through my eye and root around in the gray matter rather than endure it.

Third: how Mercury obtained Faust, and his recruitment into Project Endeavor. 

There are memos and faxes and transcribed phone calls, Lyons popping up here and there. The main name signed at the bottom of this correspondence, though, is one I recognize. “Bailey.”

“He was in charge of procuring assets,” Sabrina fills in from her corner, not looking up. “Back when Mercury was recruiting for the project. Retired a few years before they found me. You probably met him.”

“Yeah,” I say, frowning down at the neat type of Bailey’s name. “I did.”

He came to me after I’d been committed, strange because I hadn’t been allowed visitors. He brought a can of Coke with him, sat on my bed and put a hand on my knee, like my father used to do. ‘Do you want to be this person forever?’ he asked me. ‘You can stay here and continue to be defined by what happened to you. Or, if you come with me, you can make yourself a new life, a new self. How does that sound?’

He had a kind face, a salt-and-pepper mustache and big wire-rimmed glasses, and he smelled like the inside of a sandwich shop and peppery old-man cologne. Like a home. The soda he gave me was sweet and cold. No one ever came to visit me. Why would they? And I’d told myself I didn’t mind being alone, but the man sitting at the edge of my bed proved me wrong by how bad I wanted him to stay.  
And here, I see that he went to see Faust, too. In the hospital, it says, after Faust had his appendix removed. Except Faust said no and sent him away and Mercury came back and took him anyhow.

A single memo documents this event, in Bailey’s generous, looping script, sent to Lyons. Three words. ‘He said no.’ Why? Would Faust have rather spent the rest of his life in prison, cooped up, a pariah, than take the opportunity to get ‘out’? To become more wholly himself, without fear of what that meant, without fear of death or God or fathers or brothers or anything or anyone else?

This makes no sense, an itch with no scratch, and it itches in the same place as this other thing I can’t figure out about the murders themselves. On the surface, the crime scenes seem astonishing in their apparent violence, but I’ve seen worse. I’ve done worse. I guess what gets me is that the overkill doesn’t track. He struck me as precise, exact. These scenes are messy, full of rage, a sort of explosion.

I return to the truth I know so well. People are not complex. Anger and precision can exist side-by-side without difficulty, and some guilty people don’t want second chances.

At some point while piecing together Faust’s time at Mercury, I come across another ream of photos. “Hey,” I say, catching Sabrina’s attention. “You remember check-ins?”

Stepping on a scale. Reflex check. Blood draw. Listen for the beep. A camera’s flash. Every morning for one and a half years. Check-ins and mealtimes provided the only routine in all that time, blurring in my memory into something vivid and almost nostalgic. 

“Hell yeah,” she says, coming over. “You find his portfolio?”

“Look at this shit,” I say, almost fondly. Every day, three pictures, front-facing and profiles. They’re blown up, glossy five-by-eights. The one on top must be the last. Sabrina peers over my shoulder, taking in the almost translucent skin, the sunken eyes, the thin lips. 

“Geez. You weren’t joking, were you?” she says. “Ugly bastard.”

I pull out the bottom-most picture for comparison. “Day one.”

I shouldn’t be surprised by how normal he looks, but I am. Sandy hair, thin mouth, knobbed German nose, and vividly blue eyes swathed by egregious eyelashes. Something about it throws me off, and it takes me a second to figure out what it is. His eyes, offensively pretty as they are, are out of focus, a dazed slack to the rest of his expression that doesn’t fit the person I encountered behind the motel.

“They sedated him,” I say.

“Makes sense,” Sabrina says. “From what I’m looking at, he was not, how do you say…responsive. Or cooperative. He received a high dose of sedatives every day for two months, according to my stuff.”

“Hm.”

“He wasn’t a bad looking kid before Mercury got their mitts on him, was he?” she comments. 

“I don’t see the appeal,” I say, studying the photograph, “Unless skinny White-boy psychopaths are your type.”

“There are plenty of people into that, trust me,” she says, squinting. “Wait, are none of those dated?”

I flip to the back. “No.”

“Lyons!” she exclaims, shaking a mocking fist at the ceiling. “Curse your inept filing system! How many are there, then?”

“Let’s see.”

I give her half the stack and we begin to count. Then we recount. And recount again. Sabrina does it a fourth time for good measure, unconvinced.

“Four months,” she says, the first and last picture in either hand, “‘This’ to ‘that’ in four months.”

The time period is not just weirdly short, it’s truncated. Sabrina spent a year in Endeavor. I spent a year and a half. This could be chalked up to him being the first, but we both know that’s not it. It lingers in the last picture, radiating a sort of hypothermic cold, sleepy and keen as the glint in Faust’s half-lidded eyes.

Something bad happened. Something that spooked even the Mercury sociopaths into calling off a perfectly good murderous plan. 

Sabrina’s mouth has settled into a perplexed line, frown a knifepoint between her brows as she looks at the two pictures. We’ve got our context.

“I think it’s time to watch the tapes,” she says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is December 10th, the day of the second scheduled weekly upload. Next week will also be a Tuesday/Thursday upload schedule, this time with more chapters involved. Two and three respectively, I think. Anyway, we're getting deeper into the conspiracy! More shall be revealed next time.
> 
> Any guesses as to Elian's favorite book? And how do we feel about their character so far? Feel free to clue me in, I'd love to know your perceptions. 
> 
> Whether you decide to comment or not, thanks for being here! I hope you have an excellent weekend, and I'll see you again soon.
> 
> -Iz


	19. The Endeavor Tapes: Tape #1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our resident antagonist wades into the shallow water of an ever-deepening realization

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right! We have finally arrived at the motherload week of uploads! 
> 
> A couple notes to start: 
> 
> 1\. The format of this chapter is a little different, and I'll be using that same kind of format for the rest of this week's upload. You'll see as you keep reading. Hopefully it all makes sense and scans smoothly. Lmk if anything about it is jarring or confusing, and I'll be sure to shift my style for Thursday's upload accordingly. 
> 
> 2\. Very strong language this time around, so keep in mind.
> 
> As always, single quotation marks = italics.
> 
> I'll see you soon! Carry on, etc.

[Elian Castillo aka the Hunter (OC) POV]

Sabrina slips the tape in the slot, where it settles, the VHS player clicking and whirring. The tv screen powers up in a blink and fizz of light. She comes back to sit next to me, tucking her knees up to her chest. The glow washes over her face and I inch closer to her, so our shoulders press together. She doesn’t move or even look at me.

It starts to play. A child I recognize as Jason Lyons, six years younger than he is in his dad’s picture, is upside down in a handstand, cheeks puffed with effort.

“Count how long I can hold it Dad! Are you counting? Mom, is he counting?”

“He’s counting, sweetheart.”

“What the hell,” Sabrina murmurs. “This isn’t right.”

“It’s camouflage,” I say, as Jason tumbles over, yelling that he can do it better this time and to keep the camera on, dad.

“For the record, I don’t like this,” she says, crawling over and holding down the fast-forward button. “It’s making me itchy.”

“You’re the one who wants to ask questions,” I say. 

“I know. I’m not saying I want to stop. I’m just saying I don’t like this.” She pauses, looking at the screen. “All right, finally.”

The tape has switched from an eye-level home video to bird’s-eye-view security footage, the camera in question located in the upper right corner of the room. Sabrina comes back over to sit next to me.

It starts to play.

***

Tape #1:

[A white room with a table center, two chairs positioned across from each other. All three pieces of furniture are bolted down. ANONYMOUS DOCTOR TYPE (ADT) and EMMETT FAUST (EF) sit across from each other. ADT has his back to us, a clipboard visible from over his shoulder. He wears a white lab coat. EF is handcuffed to the table. He wears a white jumpsuit and does not sit still, fiddling with his handcuffs. The grainy quality of the tape distorts his face, so it is impossible to tell how far along he is in his treatment.]

ADT (into tape recorder): February 25th, 1990. 1:34 PM EST. Session 15 with Subject 0, Emmett Faust. How’re we doing today, Emmett? 

[EF does not respond, picking at his nails. His gaze is lowered so we have only a view of the top of his head. ADT lays the tape recorder on the table between them.]

ADT: I’m here to talk to you about your progress, Emmett. Do you feel you’re making progress?

EF: Fuck you.

ADT: Excuse me?

EF (he looks up, speaks clearly): I said. Fuck. You.

ADT (clears throat): Um. Well. Dr. Pearson tells me you refuse to engage in any of the tests she’s been running. Is this true?

EF: What do you fucking think? 

ADT: This language is not constructive, Emmett, and I have to ask…

EF (interrupting): What is it you’re here to know, Doc? Because I’d wager a guess that you’ve come to root around in my brain like a hog for truffles, searching for the ‘reason’ I’m so fucking uncooperative. How’s this for an answer?

[EF lunges over the table until his restraints catch him and spits. He settles back down in his chair while ADT reaches up slowly and wipes the saliva from his cheek with a kerchief.]

ADT: You shouldn’t have done that.

[EF grins and flips him off with both hands. Off-screen, a door opens, and three ATTENDANTS in blue scrubs ENTER stage right.]

ATTENDANT #1: All right, Emmett, we don’t need to make this any harder than it has to be, do we?

[All three ATTENDANTS approach with the wariness of dog catchers. EF keeps grinning, apparently relaxed, until ATTENDANTS #1-3 move all at once to pin him down to the chair. EF starts to thrash, bucking and snarling, his voice torn open and feral. ATTENDANT #2 struggles to pin his arms. ATTENDANT #3 begins to prep for an injection, sterilizing a spot on EF’s neck with rubbing alcohol. ADT gets up and moves to the far corner of the room, out of frame.]

[ATTENDANT #1, one arm pinning EF’s shoulders to the chair, uncaps a syringe he has clenched between his teeth, avoiding EF’s own teeth as he twists his head and tries to bite ATTENDANT #1.]

ATTENDANT #1 (grunting with effort): Relax, you little bastard! [To other ATTENDANTS] I can’t find a vein. [To ADT] Doc?

EF (screaming, struggling): LET ME GO LET ME GO WEASLY MOTHERFUCKER [Breaks free, ATTENDANT #2 manages to pin his arms again.] COME CLOSER I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL TEAR YOUR FUCKING TONGUE OUT OF YOUR FUCKING SKULL AND FUCKING FEED IT TO YOU [Incoherent laughter] C’MERE I’M YOUR FUCKING MONSTER AREN’T I YOU MEALY-MOUTHED FLACID –

ADT (to ATTENDANT #1, over EF): No.

[Their voices are barely audible beneath EF’s screaming. ATTENDANT #1 finally sinks the needle into EF’s neck with ATTENDANT #3’s help. EF stills, though he is still panting from exertion, and the entirety of his body remains tense.]

EF (voice hoarse, maintaining eye-contact with ADT): I will root out your eyes and crush them between my fingers like I did to that withered old bitch I will crack open your head like a hardboiled egg and eat the insides with my fucking hands I will find your ex-wife and ship her your dick in a velvet-lined box I will…I will…take…your…

[EF slurs abruptly and stutters to a stop, head slumping back against ATTENDANT #1’s shoulder, eyelids fluttering. ALL wait for a beat until they’re sure he’s out. ATTENDANTs release EF and step back. ADT moves into frame again, holding clipboard tight to his chest.]

ATTENDANT #1 (to ADT): He should come around in about a minute. I’d wait an extra five if you want him anywhere close to lucid.

ATD: The report said it’s been wearing off faster?

ATTENDANT #1: Pearson had less than five good minutes last time.

ATD: Jesus.

ATTENDANT #2 (bagging syringe in hazardous waste baggie): You’re out of your league, Darryl. I told Pearson last time she doesn’t need another shrink, she needs a priest.

[ATTENDANT #3 crosses himself. ATD draws himself up, still a so-called safe distance away from unconscious EF.]

ATD: I appreciate your concern, gentleman, but this is a problem best suited for science. I can take it from here.

[ATTENDANTs #2-3 EXIT stage right, shaking their heads. ATTENDANT #1 checks EF’s vitals.]

ATTENDANT #1: Sure, Doc. Panic button’s under your knee if you need us again.

ATD: Thank you.

[ATTENDANT #1 EXITS stage right.]

[ADT SITS. Almost a full minute later, EF shudders, sits up, and collapses bonelessly onto the table, struggling to keep his head upright. He slurs through the rest of the encounter.]

EF: Truth serum, innit?

ADT: We wouldn’t have to do this if you’d cooperate in the first place.

EF (Rests his forehead on the table, mumbles): Toothless bastard.

[ADT looks on, straight-faced, as EF turns his head and looks up at him, smiling languidly, a giggle slipping out to hover like a balloon somewhere near the ceiling.]

EF: What’d you like to know, Richard? Dick Dick Dick? Brother mine? Aider and abettor? Hm. Traitor. Look what you’ve done, Dick. Look at me, Dick! [He props his chin on his fists and then, suddenly, somberly, eyes wide and guileless, pushes back into his seat, opening his bound hands up to ADT, bursting into laughter] Ha-ha! That’s it. Traitor, traitor. Trai. Tor. [Leans closer and whispers] Traitor.

ADT: That’s quite enough.

EF (sobers): Oh, yeah. Right. It’s already wearing off. [He pulls an ugly face] I’ll have a terrible hangover very soon with you to blame but then again aren’t you always to blame or at least the Pearson-shaped voice in your ear is

ADT: Emmett. 

EF (distractedly, eyes roving the walls): No, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to answer your questions. I’ve got something else to say instead.

[ADT starts to speak.]

EF: Shut up, Dick. You’ll listen to me or I’ll phone your ex-wife and tell her everything you’ve been up to and you’ll never see little Dick Jr. and Jane ever again. Or is it Jennifer and Chris? I’m so bad with names.

ADT: How did you…?

EF: Don’t you know? ‘I’ know everything. For example, I know [clears throat and sits forward again, lowering voice conspiratorially] I know Jenny just turned thirteen and Chris is fifteen and you’re getting more and more and more scared of me. Heartbeat’s in your throat, Dick. I can hear it.

Anyway. I want to tell you about this time…when. Well, my grandma had died a few days before. You know all about my grandma. Born May 15th, 1906 in Detroit. First kid born in the states. Yeah, you know. Great grandad immigrated from the Fatherland, didn’t let his kids forget it, and my grandma she taught me what her daddy taught her until she died, and I found her the next morning in her bed.

This was, what I’m telling you about now, this was a day after. The neighbors had sent me over to the trailer to grab some of my stuff. Soon as I set foot in it, I locked the door behind me, went to the kitchen, pulled open a cupboard door, and started throwing glasses at the floor. Glasses, and…and plates, and casserole dishes, and anything I could put my hands on. I listened to it shatter. It didn’t take very long. There wasn’t much to begin with. 

And there I was, standing in the middle of this tiny kitchen, surrounded by broken glass, and the trailer still smelled like she did, cigarette smoke and her cooking, and I didn’t feel any better. I don’t know what I was thinking when I did all that, just that I missed her and I was angry and I wanted some fucking relief, I guess. But it didn’t help. I was standing there in my socks because she didn’t let shoes in her house. And I remember my mind was like this…this blank page, just nothing, until all of a sudden I thought about what she would say to me if she saw me right then.

[Rubs at his nose, thoughtful] Her dad, he said it to her, and it’s what we know, all us Fausts. It’s all we get. I mean, I was a clumsy kid. I broke stuff a lot, not on purpose, it just happened, and she’d get down to clean it up with me, and she would say, she’d say… ‘When you mess up, you gotta pick up after yourself. I’m helping you now because I’m here and I love you, but one day I’m going to be gone and no one else is going to help you out. You’ll have to do it all by yourself.’

And there I was. And she was gone. So I did what she said. I picked up all that glass and I cut myself and I cleaned the cuts and I put my own band-aids on the way she used to do and the whole time the neighbors were banging at the door, because they’d heard all the shit breaking and I opened the door and I looked at their stupid, frantic faces and I had this other thought – clear as anything. I wondered how much I would have to break to make myself feel better, and I wondered how hard it would be to clean all that up.

I thought probably not that hard. Feeling better seemed harder than picking up after myself. What do you think, Dick? What do I have to break to feel better? Because I’ll be honest, I haven’t felt better not even a little bit since then. 

Isn’t that supposed to be your job? To ask me what I feel? Cuz I’m going to be honest, Doc, Dick Dick Dick, this whole time you’ve been coming to see me I can’t remember one time you trying to care about what was going on with me. See, all I seem to remember is you trying to make me feel a certain way, trying to get me to cooperate. Is that your fucking job, Doc? Is that what you went to shrink school for?

[As EF talks, his tone shifts from introspective to hostile so gradually it’s almost impossible to chart the change. ADT sits rigid in his chair, pen pressed into a clipboard. It’s hard to tell from the tape, but his knuckles are probably white from how hard he’s squeezing that pen.]

ADT (tightly): I think now is a good time to reestablish some healthy boundaries, Emmett.

EF: Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Healthy boundaries have been ‘sorely’ lacking in this doctor/patient relationship, haven’t they? What’ll the consequences be for me crossing your expressed boundary? Shooting me full of more half-rate sedatives? Pushing your cute lil panic button? I wouldn’t, by the way. Push the button. I wouldn’t do that.

[EF’s voice has grown softer. It is still amused, still sleepy, but the slur has completely dropped out of it.]

ADT: Is that your way of setting a boundary, Emmett? Telling me not to push the panic button?

EF: No. That’s a helpful suggestion. Here’s a boundary for you: keep my fucking name out of your mouth.

ADT: How would you prefer I address you? Mr. Faust, perhaps? Or what was it your little friends on the street called you? Anglo? Or should I call you the Butcher? Address you by your working title?

[ADT’s own tone has grown cool, his posture relaxing bit by bit as he talks.]

EF: My teachers at school called me Mr. Faust. My grandma called me Emmett. I told my friends to call me Anglo. Everyone else called me the Butcher, but I always found that a little gauche. Overwrought.

ADT: What would you rather they called you?

EF: I would rather they not refer to me at all. But that’s the thing about boundaries, isn’t it? You set one, and all people do is push, push, push until you’re forced to retreat and draw a new line, or enforce the consequence.

ADT: What would you consider a just consequence to be?

EF: In reference to the name thing?

ADT: Yes.

EF: Aw, so kind of you to ask, Doc. Now we’re getting somewhere. But you’re not asking the right question. See, the right question is, do you have the power, the ability, to enforce your boundary? 

ADT: The ability to set boundaries is defined by your power and ability. You do what you can do.

EF: I agree with that. In my case, all the boundaries I’ve been able to set have been fucking flimsy as hell by necessity. And other people, other people have said, that it’s my fault for not holding that line. But I would ask those people, what would you have me do, you know? I’ve gotta eat. I’d rather not freeze to death. And I am who I am. Seems pretty basic to me. 

ADT: Would you call those things boundaries or basic needs, then?

EF: I would call the meeting of basic needs a prerequisite to boundaries. 

ADT: And you’re saying that since those basic needs weren’t met you were unable to set those boundaries.

EF: Sure. But there are other basic needs I’d throw in there, too. Like bodily autonomy. And the ability to say no when dweeby motherfuckers ask if they can take you apart and put you back together again. No, Doc, don’t interrupt. I’d hear me out on this one. Cuz the ironic part here is that these people, in their lab coats and their shiny expensive suits, reset the terms. They ‘gave’ me greater power, they enhanced my ability. 

Granted, they only did it because they thought they had enough of their own power and ability to keep me fully in-bounds. But I’m happy to report that this was an illusion borne of hubris, as it usually is when scientists and corporate types fiddle with what it means to be human. Hire a few fucking English majors, would you. Or read a book. 

Anyway. I can set boundaries now. Here’s one: I’d like to tell you how I feel, Doc. And for once, I’d like you to sit down and listen.

ADT: I’m here, aren’t I? I’m listening.

EF: Mm. Is it out of professional curiosity? Or desperate masculine arrogance? Doesn’t matter, I guess. This isn’t about you. Incredibly, this has never been about you. Or you, Renee. [He looks directly into the camera before returning his gaze back to ADT.] Funny how you’ve never caught onto that.

ADT: You wanted to tell me how you feel. Go ahead. What would you like to talk about?

EF: I don’t want to talk about anything. I’m just going to make a list. It won’t take long. I’ll finish before this truth serum finishes wearing off. 

I’m lonely, and I’ve been lonely as long as I’ve been alive. I’m miserable. I’m angry. I’m angry as I was back when my grandma died, but there’s nowhere to put the anger. I have to pick it back up. I have to pick up after myself, and that’s what I’ve been doing, picking up all that anger and stuffing it back inside my chest, my head, my hands. There’s been a pressure building since then, a pressure I can’t really explain, in those three places. It’s like the pressure you feel before a storm breaks, and it keeps on building. I have a funny feeling it’s all going to explode, and pretty soon, too, because I’ve figured out that it doesn’t ‘matter’ if I pick up after myself or not. That’s all just a way of forestalling the inevitable because no matter what I’m just going to end up in the middle of messes that were never mine in the first place. Right? Right?

Cuz I can tell you right now that this [he gestures at the room and at Project Endeavor at large, mobility restricted by his restraints] this right here was going to explode whatever psychopath you decided to whisk away on your white horse of science and progress and mutually assured destruction. It’s all pretty funny when you think about it. You’ve got to have a sense of humor about these sorts of things. Laugh or cry, right Doc?

[ADT does not speak. Dark specks appear on the piece of paper attached to the clipboard. He sets down the clipboard, reaches up and touches his face. His fingers come away stained dark red.]

ADT (faintly): What is this?

[EF sits back in his chair, eyes lidded. As we watch, blood seeps from his nostrils and down his neck, leaking from his ears. His smile this time is quiet, ferocious. There is blood on his teeth.]

EF: You feel that? That’s how you make me feel. 

ADT: You. What…Did. You do.

EF (serenely): I think now is a good time to push the panic button. Dick. Judging from experience, you’re going to be dealing with a titch of repressed anger until you’re ushered from my presence.

[ADT lets the clipboard drop to the table with a clatter, fingers wrapped tight around the pen. EF, still smiling, throws back his head to laugh.]

EF: Guards! Guards! Oh, help! My life is in imminent danger! [to ADT, sobering] I hate you, you know. I’m sure that’s not what surprises you, though. Loathing…it’s so insidious, isn’t it? So seeping and exact?

[Without warning, ADT launches himself over the table at EF. He knocks the tape recorder with his knee, sending it skittering off the table. He drops the pen and wraps his hands around EF’s throat. EF barely flinches, left side of his mouth twitching, keeping eye-contact with ADT. The THREE ATTENDANTS from before burst back into the room and pull ADT off of EF. ADT doesn’t fight them, standing between ATTENDANTS #2-3 while he trembles. ATTENDANTS #2-3 start to tug him from the room, and he resists, just barely, long enough to say]

ADT: Get Pearson.

EF (idly): You’re just mad I got one over on you. 

[The blood still flows freely from EF’s nose and ears, dripping over his chin and staining his white jumpsuit. He watches as ADT EXITS stage right with ATTENDANTS #2-3.]

EF (raises his voice, deadpan): It was nice knowing you, Dick!

[ATTENDANT #1 approaches EF.]

ATTENDANT #1: Why do you call him Dick?

EF: Because I think it’s funny. You going to put me under?

ATTENDANT #1: You going to fight me?

EF (shrugs): Probably not. I’m all worn out. 

ATTENDANT #1: You wanna give me a hint about all this blood?

EF: Fuck if I know. I didn’t finish the 8th grade. Aren’t you the one with the med-school background? [Wipes his face on his shoulder, smearing the mess.] It’ll probably stop in a couple minutes. You can put that –

[The tape cuts out abruptly, fizzing to black for a second before cheering is heard and we’re looking at a green soccer field, children ages 7-9 running around in blue and yellow jerseys. The camera blurs and follows a mop-haired figure with a #14 emblazoned on their back. It’s the Lyons’ family videos again. We see Kathy Lyons’ face in profile, bundled up, cheeks flushed.]

KATHY: Woo! Good hustle, Jason! Keep it up!

***

Sabrina scooches toward the VCR, hitting a button and cutting off Kathy Lyons mid-word. She fast-forwards through the rest of the tape.

“That’s it.”

“You think the rest are like this?”

She pops the VHS tape out. The hush of static bubbles from the tv. “Probably. He was sly, SJL. I’ll give him that.”

I hand her the second tape, and she pushes it into the player. “Did you feel it?”

“Feel what?” She doesn’t look at me. “The pressure?”

It started to build toward the end of the clip, in the middle of Faust’s monologuing. It was uncomfortable but not painful, like holding your breath for too long or a change in air pressure you feel in your ears before you pop your jaw to dissipate it. Except this went away when the clip ended, and Jason Lyons’ soccer game started. 

I nod. “What was that? Do you think?”

“I’m not sure yet. But I have a feeling we’ll know soon enough.”

The tape starts playing. It’s a birthday party in a suburban backyard. There’s balloons and ten-year-old kids running around with purple frosting staining their mouths and hands, grown-up’s holding crisp blue beer bottles.

Sabrina begins to fast-forward, through the rest of the party, then a Christmas, and a historically inaccurate school play, and an anniversary, all of it a blur, until she catches on the same white room as before. She backtracks to the beginning of the clip and pushes play.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey again!
> 
> So, as you can see, the format I'm using is sort of like a stage play (or a screenplay?) one. I've written exactly one (1) stage play for a creative writing class four years ago, and I never dipped my toes in screenplays, for better or worse. That means I'm working mostly from memory this time around, and I'm also picking and choosing elements of that format that work best for what I'm trying to do. I already know it's not exactly right in terms of that kind of formatting, and that's fine. My main concern is making sure that it's still readable and makes sense to you, the person reading. 
> 
> As I said before, if it doesn't make sense or the format isn't working, let me know and I'll see if I can make some adjustments before the Thursday upload! I can always edit in retrospect as well, so if something's really bugging you, still feel free to hit me up after that 12/17 date. This format may also be making an appearance later, depending on how my current edits go, so I'd rather know now than later if shit isn't connecting etc. 
> 
> All that said, thanks for being here! There are two more chapters incoming today (as I noted in Chapter 16), so I'll see you in a minute. 
> 
> -Iz


	20. The Endeavor Tapes: Tape #2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we watch the second tape with our resident antagonist and company

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, y'all.
> 
> No POV's this time around. We're watching tape #2 with Elian and Sabrina from the floor of Sabrina's hidey-hole. We'll hear from Elian next chapter. 
> 
> No italics make an appearance, either, so proceed. I'll see you in a bit.

[Same room as before. EMMETT FAUST (EF) sits across the table from a young woman in high-waisted paisley dress-pants, the sleeves of her white peasant blouse pushed up over her elbows. She is MELANIE PEARSON (MEL). Her aura is fresh-faced, pleasant, and efficient, black hair chopped off at her jaw. This is in contrast to EF, who despite the poor quality of the tape, still comes off decidedly worse for wear. His hair is longer, grown past his chin, and has gone from the dark blonde of the session previous to waxy yellow white. He slumps in his chair, hands still handcuffed to the table, and his posture suggests less indolence than misery and/or exhaustion. MEL has a stack of paper and three plastic cups. As the tape starts, she pulls a tape recorder out of her pants pocket and clicks it on.]

MEL: March 15th, 1990. 2:34 pm EST. Session 27 with Subject 0, Emmett Faust. How are we feeling, Emmett?

EF: Like shit. Obviously. Why are you here, Mel?

MEL: Excuse me?

EF: You know better than to get in bed with these shitheads. What is it they’re offering you? Or are they threatening you? Or… [he pauses, tilting his head, frowning] Oh. I understand. She asked for your help. I’m sorry I’m so hopeless, Mel. Even you’ll make no progress with me.

MEL (shuffling her papers): There are protocols, Emmett. You aren’t allowed to try and access anyone’s thoughts outside the context of those specific tests.

EF: You know what I did, don’t you?

MEL: That’s not my purview. But yes. I know. Pearson briefed me before she brought me in. You don’t scare me.

EF: You say her name like you don’t love her.

MEL (Makes a note on one of her papers): We’re not here to discuss my personal life.

EF: No, we’re here to see if I can guess which cup has the paper wad underneath it. A much better, more constructive use of time. I am…starting to get the impression that you all are trying to bore me into submission.

MEL: Consider it a revoking of privilege. If you prove you can behave and engage in small tests like these, then maybe we can move onto tests which actually push you.

EF: You wrote your middle name on that piece of paper. Twice. Melanie Elise. Pretty.

[MEL’s pen stills on the paper. EF smiles at her, not his jack-o-lantern grin but something small, the kind of smile that’s barely a flicker in the mouth.]

EF (dreamily): The tests aren’t the thing, Mel. The tests are ancillary. I’m being poisoned. She’s poisoning me. I can feel it. I feel it. And…I’m dying. Or I’m becoming less. I’m so close to this eternal edge. I feel high, all the goddamn time, and the ceiling explodes into stars or carpets of ants or…

Do you know what’s it like to lose your ability to panic? It’s like floating. My feet are never on the floor. It’s as if the world…or me, I guess…is happening in some other room, and I’m …sitting here, listening, but it’s muffled, far away. I’ve got this vague sense it’s all there, but it doesn’t matter much. 

She thinks if I’m calmer than the nosebleeds will stop. Like if she can make me not angry anymore I won’t be what I am. But what she’s doing is killing the smaller parts of myself. The anger is the biggest and the strongest and it’ll be the last to go.

I’m…dissolving, I think. I’m dissolving. [Fiddles with handcuffs, eyes downcast] Is…anything still real, or am I just…slipping, losing my edges, dissolving into everything…What do you think? You’re the immovable object she’s sent to meet the unstoppable force. 

MEL (unfazed): Focus, Emmett. Do you need me to call the Attendant on Duty? Get your brain back on track?

EF: No. Do you think I deserve this? Is that why you can stomach it?

MEL: This isn’t about me.

EF (distractedly, frowning): It isn’t about me, either. Not really. You didn’t like it when Andy cut open the fat stomach of that frog…the dread spilled into your gut like dry ice…

[MEL casts a glance up at the camera, her eyes wide and stern, her fingers slipping under the table to press the panic button. EF’s gaze, dark now rather than the bright blue it was in the previous session, is hazy, detached, centering loosely on MEL.]

EF: What’s wrong? What did I do?

[MEL gathers up her things, deliberate and steady. EF watches her, unperturbed.]

EF: You’re going to leave?

MEL: Yes. 

EF: I scare you now. 

MEL (hesitates): No.

EF: I’m not supposed to know about your brother, am I? That’s different than before. Isn’t it? I can’t…I don’t think I’m keeping very good track anymore. But that’s why, earlier, you said I shouldn’t ‘try’ and get into your head…but…you still feel it, don’t you? 

[MEL reaches up to the back of her skull, fingers trembling.]

MEL: How’re you doing it? Do you know?

EF (tiredly, fingers picking at the handcuffs): How’m I getting past the device wired into your spine? The same way the tide washes in, I guess. It’s blinking in my peripheral like a lighthouse on the shore, like fireflies…

[The doorknob rattles followed by banging and muffled shouts, cutting him off. They both look in that direction. MEL’s hand drops away from her neck.]

MEL (sharply): Unlock the door, Emmett. [Takes a step toward him.] Unlock it!

[EF looks down at his hands, eerily placid.]

EF: I can’t. It’s not me. 

MEL (raising her voice): Don’t lie to me. Open the door!

[EF sighs and puts his head down. The banging grows louder, more insistent. MEL drops her stuff on the floor with a loud smack and backs up to the door, yanking at the handle.]

EF (to the surface of the tabletop): I had a brother once. Not my real brother. We’d go to this diner on Valerie Street whenever we pulled a big score, order as many blueberry pancakes and sides of bacon as we could eat, chug orange juice like it was a sport. I felt like a kid then. Like everything was in order. Like it all made sense. Stupid. 

MEL: Renee! RENEE! Can you hear me? Let me out! AUNTY! 

[MEL bangs at the door with her hands, pulls at the handle. The noise on the other side has ceased. EF lifts his head to watch her, and we see that blood has started to seep from his nostrils and ears. MEL whirls on her heel toward him, gets into his space.]

MEL: You have to stop this, Emmett. You have to make it stop. 

EF: I can’t.

MEL: Bullshit!

EF [reaches toward her face but is stopped by his restraints]: Oh, you’re crying. What did you think I meant when I said I’d lost all my edges?

MEL (softly): You’re crying too.

EF: Am I?

[MEL sinks down next to him, digging her hands into her hair.]

MEL: I can taste it. Jesus. Make it stop. 

[Still squatting, MEL twists her body back toward the camera, her face a mess of blood and runny mascara and tears.]

MEL (voice raw): Aunty! Aunty let me out! [Burying her face in her hands, muffled] What’ve you done?

[EF stares straight ahead sightlessly, his hands flat against the table, blood running freely from his nose and ears. He does nothing to try and staunch it. He doesn’t even seem aware of it.]

EF (distantly): You haven’t cried since you were twelve years old. I know that. 

What’re you thinking of Mel? Are you with me or are you by yourself? It’s sour, isn’t it? Loneliness, the aftertaste of orange juice, bile…

[MEL has her forehead pressed to his thigh, her blood staining the white fabric of his jumpsuit red. She’s still crying.]

EF: I’m hurting you. [Softly, to himself] It’s so much. A bursting of dams. Are you real?

MEL (mumbling): I’m real, I’m real…

EF: Sure. All right. Am…are…you real? There’s water all around my feet, getting higher…it’s all getting louder. Closer. 

[EF shakes his head, blinking, his expression clearing and muddling, clearing and muddling. He hits the side of his head with the palm of his hand. Once, twice. A brief flash of certainty passes over his face. He steadies himself, shoulders straightening, and takes a deep, shaky breath. Then he slams his head forward into the table. MEL reels backward, wiping her face clean with the heels of her hands.]

MEL (startled): What are you doing?

[He does it again. Again.]

MEL: Stop! Stop it!

[EF pauses, grinning at her the way he used to grin, wide and fierce.]

EF: Make me.

MEL: Stop. It hurts!

EF: I know.

[He succeeds in knocking himself out, slumped forward on the table. The door to the room flies open. The tape cuts to Jason Lyons’ piano recital, halfway through Bach’s Minuet in G Major.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right, thanks for sticking around! That was the second chapter scheduled for this week's Tuesday upload. I'll be back in a few minutes with the third and final chapter for today. 
> 
> Onward, upward, etc. 
> 
> -Iz


	21. The Endeavor Tapes: Intermission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our resident antagonist and friend reflect on what they've just seen before delving into even deeper water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, here we go, last but not least of the Tuesday uploads. No italics, see you on the other side, etc.

[Elián Castillo aka the Hunter (OC) POV]:

This time, Sabrina doesn’t move. Minuet in G Major swirls through the hidey-hole, catching in the trash bin full of ashes and sticking in the warren of shadows. The stacks of files might be mountains, the underside of the camp bed a dark valley, the softly glowing Santa an omen or something worse and realer.

It makes sense now, and I almost wish it didn’t. I almost wish I’d never watched these tapes at all. If it were a scene from a movie, words on a page, I might know what to make of it, might be able to judge it as campy or extreme or unrealistic or fraught, but I can’t do that. I know it’s real the way I know everything. I can feel it. 

“Tell me you get it,” I say.

Sabrina glances at me, her chin propped on her knees. “You mean how he was able to warp the emotions of anyone else in the room with him?”

“Outside the room, too,” I add. “That silence in the hall…that’s why no one came for her.”

“It started with that doctor,” she murmurs, ticking off the chain of events on her fingers, “And it was less severe. He was cognizant, aware what he was doing…”

“He set a trap,” I interject.

She nods, frowning. “They introduced the staff implants as a way to prevent him from doing it, getting in their heads, causing whatever the fuck that was, aneurysms or something.”

“And it didn’t work,” I add. “Or it did work, and then he found a way to get around them.”

“It wasn’t intentional, that second time.”

“Do you think it was ever intentional? Or that he was just lucid enough to use it to his advantage the first time and not the second?”

“And was the lucidity directly related to the treatments he was getting for enhancement? Or was it a result of all the other shit? The sedatives, and…and emotional suppressants he mentioned? Or was it a mix of all of that, like when you put together ammonia and bleach and accidentally make fucking chlorine gas?”

We look at each other in silence, Minuet in G Major tripping around us light and sober as a fairy or something else equally wild and unreal. 

“He doesn’t know,” I say at last, quietly. “He has no idea he has that in him.”

“They wiped him,” Sabrina murmurs. “Makes sense, I guess. But it seems like they were fine to keep going with…whatever it is they were doing, no matter the risk. Why’d they ice him?”

“Why didn’t they just dispose of him then, when they could?” I ask. “Why take the risk that he’d ever wake up at all?”

Sabrina holds up the third tape. “I think we’re about to find out.”

“How much more can there be?” I wonder.

“I don’t know.” She finally moves to the VHS player, zipping through the rest of the tape to make sure there’s nothing more of use on it. “But I’m finally starting to understand those weaklings who can’t watch horror movies.”

“You going to sleep with the lights on?”

“Lights on? I’m not sleeping down here. I’m sleeping in your room, asshole.”

Her levity almost dissipates the strange mood. 

Before she pushes the last tape into the player, we look at each other, the question inevitable in the quiet.

“Did you…it was never like that for you, was it?” I ask.

She shakes her head, her expression closed-off, introspective. “It for sure wasn’t fucking pleasant. But no. It was never…that bad. You?”

“No,” I say. “But if it were that bad, would we even know? Would we remember?”

“What Shaw and these other power-hungry assholes forget is the complexity of the brain. As much as they would like to believe they can do it, it’s not an easy thing to completely erase a memory,” she says. “You store the things that happen to you in your body, stick them in the places they fit. Even if your conscious mind doesn’t remember what happened to you, your unconscious mind protects you. It remembers so you don’t have to remember. And in that way, you never forget.”

“That’s…really poetic,” I say, partly serious, mostly teasing.

“I’ve been published, idiot,” she tells me. “They used to pay me to be poetic.”

Without further ceremony, she pushes the final tape into the player.

It begins to play. Kathy Lyons stands in a dining room beside a red cabinet, hands behind her back, kerchief tied around her pretty hair, beaming proudly.

“Do you like it?” she asks.

“You did this all yourself?” Stephen asks from behind the camera, impressed.

She lays a hand against the side of the cabinet. “I did. Ten bucks at a garage sale, can you believe it?”

“I can,” Stephen says dryly, “Considering I’m the one who wrangled it into the car for you.”

She laughs and slaps him lightly, before turning to admire the cabinet again. “It looks good though, right? Do you think someone would buy it?”

“Heck yeah I do,” Stephen says. 

“Really? Because I’m thinking of doing it more,” she says, “Make a little extra money.”

He comes up beside her, and she falls out of frame, the cabinet front and center.

“I think you can do anything you set your mind to, honey.”

Sabrina doesn’t even have to press the fast-forward button. It skips from this immediately to the last Easter egg Stephen left behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is where I leave you until Thursday, when I will be posting the last two chapters of the motherload upload (motherupload? there's gotta be a better way to say that). Anyway. Hopefully it's starting to make sense why I wanted to group these together.
> 
> I'll be back on Thursday. As always, thanks for being here, and I'll see you then.
> 
> -Iz


	22. The Endeavor Tapes: Tape #3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we discover the contents of the third and final tape SJL left behind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: brief description of suicide attempt
> 
> Hey guys, second batch of motherupload chapters. A couple notes:
> 
> There is no POV this time around. As with tape #2, we're sitting with Elian and Sabrina on the floor of the hidey-hole as they watch this play out.
> 
> Onward, upward, etc.

[STEPHEN J LYONS [SJL] sits at the dining room table partly featured in the last home-video clip, the red cabinet visible over his shoulder. The light is dim and gray, and he looks haggard, the lines around his eyes and between his eyebrows carved deep and severe as ravines. Anger radiates off of him in waves, though he does his best to keep it contained, fingers knit together on the table in front of him, his lips pressed to a tight, thin line, his knuckles livid and white.]

SJL: Kathy. I can’t talk long. You and Jace will be back any minute. [He glances over his shoulder as if they will appear behind him, summoned] If you’re seeing this, I’m sorry. You weren’t ever meant to be a part of it. I pray you believe me. Even at my worst, even at my lowest, my sole intention was to keep the work I do away from this family. Now I’m afraid your involvement is inevitable.

[He heaves a heavy sigh, rubbing at the crease between his brow with the two middle fingers of his left hand. His wedding band glints dully in the dim light.]

SJL: I asked you not to watch what was on the other two tapes. I understand if you refused to do that. You were…have always been so stubborn, and I love that about you, although…you probably don’t want to hear that from me right now. You probably don’t want to hear anything from me. If you saw the footage I included on the other tapes, I imagine you will be angry, upset, confused. You have a right to all those emotions. I cannot explain what you saw beyond saying that, yes, what you’re afraid of is true. I am responsible for what you witnessed, in one way or another. Again, I am deeply sorry. I cannot explain to you what you saw, not in any way that will make sense.

All I can say is that I made a mistake. That boy in the tapes is who you think he is. He has done what you know he has done. And I…I will let you come to a just conclusion regarding why I would allow such a person to be brought into a project where I knew he would likely be made stronger, and for a worse, eviler end than he has already achieved, but this time for a corporate will rather than his own. I would tell you I regret everything, that I wish I could take it back, but that would be a lie, and I made a promise not to lie to you. How ironic that must seem now. 

Kathy…Kath. I have to ask one last favor of you. One last favor, and then you can do what you will with my memory. Two. There are two favors, actually.

[He sighs again and looks down at the table rather than at the camera, twisting the ring on his finger.]

You need to take this to the FBI field office in Detroit. Tell them who you are. They will protect you so long as you have this to give to them. Tell them the truth – that you knew nothing, that I was a shitty husband, that you want to do the right thing. Then give them these tapes, and the box of my stuff Bonnie brought to you. 

After that, leave. Leave the country if you can. Take Jace and your sister with you. Bring only what’ll fit in the car. Do not look back. Do not turn around.

I love you. 

[He looks back into the camera, his hands stilling.]

Now, if you ever loved me, you’ll do what I ask, and you will turn off this tape. I promise you that you do not want to see any more of this. It will stay with you, and you’ll never be rid of it. Trust me. 

***

[The tape whirs through a few frames of black before showing a split screen. On one side- labeled LVL 1 in the bottom-left corner - security footage of a white padded room, a barefoot figure in the corner, contained by a straitjacket. He is ghoulish, skeletal, his skin gray and his cheeks concave, his eyes black holes in his skull. He is hardly recognizable as EMMETT FAUST [EF] On the other side of the screen – labeled LVL 3 in the bottom-left corner - there is footage of a long hallway lined with doors. It looks like a hospital, or a lab. A man in a blue janitorial uniform [the Janitor] pushes a cart down the hall.

There is no sound, either cut out or never there in the first place. On the left side of the screen, EF’s body contorts as he tries to free himself, feet scrabbling against the padded floor, back arched. His face is twisted, his head thrown back. He is screaming. The only sound we can hear is the whir of the VHS tape. 

On the right side of the screen, the Janitor goes about mopping, his back to the camera. The cast of the florescent light on the concrete floor suggests it is late. A woman appears in frame, wearing a security guard’s uniform [SG], belt bulky with a gun and flashlight. She raises her hand to the Janitor.

The Janitor does not respond. SG stiffens, repeats her missive. The Janitor does not move. SG approaches, hand hovering near her belt. The Janitor looks up and SG backpedals, shock on her face. Blood drips on the freshly mopped floor. The Janitor reaches for his front pocket, bring out something slim, a pen, probably, and raises it level with his own neck. SG lunges at the Janitor, and they grapple for a minute until SG succeeds in knocking the Janitor’s arm against the wall until he drops the pen. The Janitor is still bleeding freely from his nose and ears, but he stands, swaying, facing SG, his back to us.

SG reaches for her radio and pauses, feeling something. Touches her ear. Her fingers come away red. A half-second later, her nose starts bleeding.

She lifts the radio to her mouth, watching the Janitor, who has propped his back against the wall and now slides slowly to the floor. SG unhooks her belt, laden as it is, drops it to the floor and kicks it away, trying to staunch her bleeding nose with her sleeve. 

On the other side of the screen, EMMETT FAUST is still screaming. 

He screams as the Security Guard feels for the Janitor’s pulse. 

He screams as she collapses, eyelids fluttering. 

He screams while back-up appears in the form of two more guards who find their colleague and the Janitor unresponsive.

He screams as they, too, start hemorrhaging and lose consciousness. He is still screaming when the screen fades to black.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey again. Hopefully formatting is still making sense, lmk, etc. As I mentioned previously, there will be two chapters in the 12/17 upload, so stick around, and the second will show up momentarily, finishing out the Endeavor Tapes section of this saga. 
> 
> As always, thank you for being here. I'll see you soon.
> 
> -Iz


	23. The Endeavor Tapes: Encore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our resident antagonist considers the implications of what they now know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, second chapter for this special edition Thursday upload. As usual, single quotation marks = italics.
> 
> Carry on.

[Elian Castillo aka the Hunter (OC) POV]:

We put everything back where we found it. The evidence, the tapes, the tv, everything. Sabrina leaves the coffeepot and the popcorn bowl in the sink in the kitchen. It is almost four in the morning. We will only get two hours of sleep before we have to report at six– me to Shaw to prep for my mission, Sabrina to assimilation.

We drag a mattress into my room from the room across the hall. Neither of us says a word as I click off the light and we crawl in bed and pretend to go to sleep. 

A little while later, after I’ve almost drifted off, Sabrina gets up and stands over my bed.

“Move over,” she says.

I obey, and she crawls in, puts her back to me, bunching her own pillow under her chin, the ridge of her spine pressing against mine. There’s barely room for both of us. I’m pressed into the cold wall. She’s in danger of rolling off onto the floor. But we fall asleep that way. Or she falls asleep that way, and then I fall asleep to her steady breathing. Her warmth, even though I don’t need it, comforts me. 

I never, ever intend to tell her how much, though she probably already knows.

In the morning, I wake up to find her already gone. A nightmare flits at the edges of my vision, dissipating. Emmett Faust as he used to be, blue-eyed and scrappy, held a gore-coated icepick under my chin.

“Do I deserve what’s about to happen to me?” he asked.

I couldn’t answer him. 

Sabrina, characteristically, has not left a note or any sort of clue as to what I’m meant to do next. I know what she would say, though. I’m prepared. That’s all I’m meant to be. I’ve got the facts, more facts than Shaw or Mercury were ever going to give me, and now I am equipped to face Emmett Faust and complete my mission.

It might, I think vaguely, even be a mercy to put him out of his misery. 

I’m sure this would comfort me if I believed in mercy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was very short, wasn't it? My apologies. It is what it is. Next week's uploads will be longer to make up for it. (They were going to be longer anyway, but you can consider it a gift if you like.)
> 
> I've decided I like the Tuesday/Thursday upload schedule, so I'm going to go ahead and do what I contemplated earlier on, and just post one chapter on Tuesday (12/22) and one of Thursday (12/24). I am aware that's Christmas Eve, but for those who celebrate Christmas, do you actually do anything on Christmas Eve anyhow? Your family can't even drag you to church this time around, if you're in the States and your state has restrictions in place at the moment. 
> 
> Anyhow, the next time I'll see y'all is Tuesday. As always, thank you for being here. I appreciate it.
> 
> Until then,
> 
> -Iz


	24. A Well-Meaning Billionaire and Other American Myths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony enters the chat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back! We are fresh from the event known as the Motherupload and back to mostly regularly scheduled programming! As I mentioned last week, I'm going to be testing out a new Tuesday/Thursday upload schedule. Still just two chapters a week, but a little more spread out. 
> 
> So, without further ado, the Tuesday chapter. A few notes:
> 
> We're back to the usual POVs after the shift in formatting that was the Motherupload - so, third person for our canon characters, first person for ocs, etc., you get it.
> 
> Single quotes = italics etc.
> 
> That's it, carry on.

[Sam Wilson POV]

Earlier that day, Sam completely switches off the notifications on his phone. He puts it on airplane mode, on do not disturb mode, he specifically blocks certain numbers, he does everything he can to stop Tony Stark from getting in touch with him.

Then, with relative peace of mind, he eats the omelet Bucky has made for him, turns on his white noise machine, and goes to sleep.

He has to admit, he sleeps way better with a super-vigilant former assassin with a metal arm in the house, especially since said assassin stays up until all hours of the night watching cable news and surfing the dark web.

It’s comforting, in its way, although the living situation becomes way weirder when he tries to explain it to normal people. Accountants, stockbrokers, and other people with stable 401Ks like to talk about the weather and maybe how much the mayor sucks. They have spouses and children and small white cockapoos named Snowball, not two insomniac super-soldier buddies who need another human being to fret over at all times or else they’ll implode.

Super-soldier buddies who are secretly or not-so-secretly in love with one other, a state of affairs which has resulted in complex and disastrous situations when one or the other can’t get it together and admit to his feelings.

Sam understands that both Bucky and Sam come from a time where being gay or gay-adjacent was not just considered taboo and against the law but was rarely ever acknowledged in wider society as a possibility. 

Even so, it has been painful to watch this song and dance go on for months, especially when he has to pay an absurd amount of rent to live in the middle of it.

Anyway. He’s nearly asleep, dwelling blissfully on matters which are not Tony Stark, or the homicidal teenager Steve has decided to adopt, when someone starts banging on the front door.

Sam sits up and switches off his white-noise machine, listening as Bucky mutes the television and goes to the door. 

Muffled, he hears Bucky say gruffly, “No one’s home.”

“Where’s Sam?” a familiar, grating voice demands. “SAM! I know he’s in there. Come out, you coward!”

Sam groans and flops back into his pillows.

“He’s asleep,” Bucky says. “Go away or I’m ringing the landlady.”

“I’m shaking in my boots,” Tony Stark returns scathingly. “SAM! Get out here, or I’ll buy this building and turn it into an overpriced juice bar!”

Sam hauls himself out of bed and trudges out to the kitchen where Bucky stands cross-armed glaring at the door. 

“Gentrification isn’t something to joke about, Tony,” he says.

“There he is,” Tony says from the other side of the door, unfazed. “Now open up, would you? It’s chilly out here in the hall.”

“Chilly in here, too,” Sam mutters.

“There’s a cardigan on the back of the couch,” Bucky tells him, which would be sweet if Sam were not already sleep-deprived and irritated.

“Thanks, man,” he says, and pulls open the door. 

Tony stands there, smug and impeccably tailored as always, Happy just behind him.

“Your security stays out in the hall,” Sam says. “I don’t want that shit in my living space.”

“C’mon man, that’s uncalled for. We’ve exchanged Christmas cards,” Happy complains, faux-begrudgingly.

He hangs back in the hall with more than a little relief as Tony steps into the apartment and Sam slams the door shut behind him.

“I’m going to have to do another cleansing when you leave,” Bucky says, returning to the couch. “You’re fucking with the aura. Again.”

“Very domestic of you, Barnes,” Tony says, surveying the space. 

Bucky has commandeered the living room, beer bottles and an in-progress game of Solitaire cluttering the coffee table, newspapers spread over the floor and a fresh bus-station Stark Enterprises ad taped up beside the tv, three darts lodged in Tony’s forehead. DICK has been scrawled over his chest in livid red Sharpie.

For his part, Bucky has carved a space out in the couch, in his usual nighttime outfit of sweats and a sleeveless white t-shirt, a crocheted afghan pulled over his shoulders, metal arm gleaming in the dull blue tv light.

In comparison, Tony wears a suit, the tie loosened around the collar and the shirtsleeves pushed up over his elbows, a grease stain smudged down his front. He looks as if he’s just come from a gala or an important dinner with some high-up city commissioner.

“What’re you doing here, Tony?” Sam asks, before Tony can get out a one-liner.

Tony turns to him. “You know why I’m here.”

“I don’t, actually,” Sam says, blisteringly polite. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

“You gonna offer me a seat? A drink? A drink would be nice. Real hospitable.”

“No,” Bucky says from the couch.

“What he said,” Sam intones, very kindly not adding that Bucky is the reason there’s no alcohol left in the apartment to imbibe.

“Fine.” Tony offers a tiny, tight-lipped smile. “You know, I’ve been thinking over what you said to me at the debrief the other day.”

“The debrief where you lost your shit and called me a liar?”

“‘Losing my shit’ is a bit strong, isn’t it?”

Sam leans against the counter next to the sink. “That’s what I call it when rich White people start lobbing wild accusations at me.”

“Not cool,” Bucky adds.

Tony sighs. “I’m getting a little tired of being called paranoid for calling out what I see happening right under my nose. What else am I supposed to do when a member of the team isn’t being straight with me? This whole thing doesn’t work unless we’re honest with each other.”

“Tell me, Tony,” Bucky says, “What gives you the audacity to believe we owe you anything, let alone the truth?”

Tony doesn’t even look at him, his tone frigid. “You don’t get to talk to me.”

“Then you shouldn’t be in my fucking house.” 

“I know you have something to do with this,” Tony turns on his heel, bristling in the way only rich powerful men do, “And I will figure it out eventually. It’s no use trying to hide this from me.”

Bucky remains composed, venomously pleasant. “Yeah? You learn your lesson from the first go-around?” 

“Tony,” Sam cuts in before Tony can escalate the situation further, “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

“The truth, Sam. You know, I’ve always respected you even when I’ve disagreed with you, but this…this is beyond the pale.”

Sam shakes his head. “I think you know this isn’t my call.”

From his spot, Bucky snorts, flipping over a two of hearts in his game of solitaire.

This time, Tony resists the bait. “I don’t think you know how absurd you sound when you say that. Isn’t your call? No. None of this is your call. And none of it is Steve’s call, either.”

“Whose call is it, then?” Bucky asks acidly. “Yours?”

“It’s the ‘team’s’ call,” Tony insists. “That’s the point of all of this, isn’t it? That we don’t make decisions on a whim, we do it as a group.”

Sam lets that statement sit for a minute, lets Tony marinate in it. He really doesn’t comprehend the irony. He has always had the power to veto any decision the group has made. He provides most of the funding. He does most of the networking. He preens for the media and has maintained the most consistent approval rating outside any of the others, excluding his own wife.

He’s in his element with all of this, though he would never admit it. He was raised into it, practically custom-built for it.

“Look, I know about the EU being involved in the explosion at the Mercury lab in Detroit,” Tony says. “FRIDAY picked up on the chatter on those online forums almost as soon as they started to happen. I also know that you had security footage scrubbed from Carlsbad Impound. I know you’re hiding something, or someone, from me. Who is it?”

“I’m not the person who can answer that question for you,” Sam says.

“Funny,” Tony chuckles. “Real cute. Like Cap hasn’t dropped off the map and Natasha hasn’t suddenly stopped taking my calls.”

“Did she ever take your calls?” Bucky asks tonelessly, flipping another card.

Tony ignores him. “Did you tell Steve that he’s flushing years of progress down the toilet? This isn’t my fault. I want that noted. This is on his head.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, straight-faced. “Trust me, I informed Steve of all the pros and cons before he decided to go down this road, and I don’t know what to tell you. He chose to do it anyway. If he wanted to read you in on this, he would’ve done it.”

“Sorry if that messes with your bromance vision for the future,” Bucky interjects.

“Who else is in on this?” Tony demands. “Tell me that, at least. I know Natasha is. Who else? Wanda? Clint?”

“Why don’t you ask them that?” Sam says.

“And ask yourself why he doesn’t want you anywhere near this,” Bucky adds. “Might be a good time for some badly needed self-reflection.”

“You’re only here because Steve made you a non-negotiable term of this new agreement,” Tony says coldly. “If I had it my way, you would be in a hole so deep underground you’d never see light again.”  
Bucky looks at him, his dark eyes blank. “You think you hate me, but you don’t really understand what hate is.” 

“What do you think happens to you if Steve bails on all of this?” 

He shrugs. “I go wherever Steve goes, and you try and fail to catch me, just like last time.”

“I think it might be time for you to leave, Tony," Sam says into the tense silence that follows Bucky's statement.

Tony glares between the two of them. “Fine. If that’s the way you want to play it, Fine. But you can tell Steve that I will figure out what you’re hiding from me.”

“And when you find out, whose side will you be on?” Sam asks.

Bucky laughs. “Oh, I’ve got a good guess.”

Sam goes over and raps on the door. “Hey, Happy, I’ve got your charge ready for you.”

He opens the door and steps aside, raising an eyebrow at Tony who towers, fuming, before he collects his dignity and sweeps out into the hall.

He stops in the doorway.

“You know, if you read me into what was going on, I could help. You are deliberately cutting yourself off from probably the greatest resource in the world right now.”

“You always want to help, Tony,” Sam says tiredly. “That’s one of your greatest attributes. You’re so damn altruistic.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“That you’re a control freak,” Bucky says. “And you’ve got a version of right and wrong that’s not exactly fucking flexible.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Tony replies breezily. “Telling. Happy, let’s go. I’ve got a call with the United Nations in the morning.”

Sam shuts and locks the door behind them.

Bucky waits until their footsteps have retreated down the hall to mutter, “Fucker.” He digs a dart out from between the couch cushion and flings it at Tony’s face.

Sam, for his part, goes around the island counter to where Tony stood, and feels beneath the lip of it until he finds a little listening device, about the shape and size of a dime.

“That was smooth,” he says, pulling it off and dropping it in a cup of tepid orange juice Bucky has left to molder beside the sink. “I didn’t even catch when he did that.”

“Fucker,” Bucky repeats, mutinous. “If I have to see that smug bastard’s face again…”

“I know you two aren’t exactly one another’s biggest fans,” Sam says, “But he’s got a point.”

“Which part? It all sounded like blowhard nonsense from where I’m sitting.”

“You mean the same spot on the couch you’ve been occupying for the last few months?” Sam asks. “You’re not exactly in the most pristine state of mind, pal. And I say that with love.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Bucky mutters, so morose and helpless it hurts. 

“Going all maverick on this isn’t exactly the smartest move in the playbook,” Sam muses, knowing that Bucky would literally rather be shot than offered sympathy. “I know it’s our go-to, but Tony could prove to be an invaluable resource if we read him in.”

“Sure,” Bucky says. “He could be helpful. But do you think he’s going to look at Emmett Faust, serial killer extraordinaire and rogue enhanced Hydra-adjacent asset and come up with any sort of strategy compatible with ‘mercy’ or ‘benefit-of-the-doubt’? That’s not exactly his strong suit. It might’ve escaped your notice, but he’s an attack first think later type of guy.”

“Fair enough,” Sam says, tapping his fingers against the counter, thoughtful. “God, I’m too tired for this.”

“Have you heard from Steve? Or Nat? They’re supposed to be reaching their secondary location soon, aren’t they?”

This statement injects worry directly back into Sam’s bloodstream. “He hasn’t checked in yet. But he will. There’s still time.”

“Hm.” 

Sam knows they’re both thinking about what Steve said happened at the motel, and he would bet money that they’re experiencing some version of the same creeping suspicion that they might be in deeper shit than they first thought.

As if on cue, a phone starts to ring somewhere in the apartment. Sam doesn’t recognize the ringtone and looks to Bucky.

“Is that yours?”

Bucky hasn’t moved, frowning either in shock or disbelief. “Yeah. It is.” 

“Are you going to answer it?”

He pushes himself up from the couch and retreats to his room, emerging with the prepaid flip phone still vibrating in his hand. “It’s Steve. I…I can’t. Here.” He shoves the phone into Sam’s hand.

“Jesus,” Sam mutters, flipping it open. “Y’all are ridiculous. Hello?”

“Sam?” Steve sounds justifiably confused. “I…did I call the wrong number?”

“No, you’ve called the right number, but you’ve been a dick long enough that things have started to get petty, evidently,” Sam says. “I’m going to put you on speaker phone.”

He does so before Steve can muster a reply.

“You’re late, man. Did you make it to the secondary location as planned?”

“Yeah. Well, sort of. Something happened. We’re all fine, but…we need you. I need you. Both of you.”

Bucky has retreated to the window, shoulders tensed, arms crossed.

“That’s going to be a little tough. Tony’s watching us like a hawk.”

“I could talk to Wanda to get us out,” Bucky says.

“Okay. That could work. It’ll be tricky. But that could work. You want us to meet you there? What’s going on?”

“It’s a long story.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, not much to say. Thanks for sticking around, I appreciate it. I'll be back Thursday aka Christmas Eve. In the meantime, have a great week if you can and I'll see you soon.
> 
> -Iz


	25. Bloodbath at the B&B

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emmett comes around and the gang deals with an unwelcome, Mercury-themed surprise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, y'all, welcome to the Christmas Eve upload! Just the usual to start out - 
> 
> Single quotations = italics
> 
> Carry on, and I'll see you on the other side!

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]

I come to on the floor to the smell of stale carpet and mothballs. After that, the rest fills itself in. Steve brought me to the B&B. Natasha knocked me out. Sharon would rather not look at me. They’re all standing over me, waiting for me to show signs of life. Sharon sort of hopes I never come back around. Natasha finds both life and death meaningless, so it doesn’t matter to her. Steve is looking at me but thinking of someone else.

From the way they react when I open my eyes and sit up, I’m guessing I wasn’t out for longer than a few seconds, which is a good sign.

“Huh,” Natasha says, regarding the device still in her hand, “Thought that would last longer.”

“You knew that would happen?” I ask.

Natasha smirks. “I didn’t know what would happen. I had hopes.”

“Nat,” Steve says placatingly, before turning to me. “You hit your head pretty hard on the way down. We’ll have to check for a concussion before we do anything else.”

“He’s not concussed,” Natasha says.

I use the chest at the end of the bed to pull myself back upright. “She’s right. I’m not concussed.” My balance is a little off, and I feel a little buzzy and lightheaded, but otherwise there aren’t any obvious adverse side-effects.

“So, did it work?” Sharon asks.

Natasha shrugs. “No way to tell from the outside.”

“We’re almost positive Mercury was tracking him up to a few seconds ago,” Steve adds. “Which means we should leave before they show up.”

“‘We’?” Sharon says, raising an eyebrow. “If you mean the four of us, there’s going to have to be a change of plans. I was willing to help coordinate intel, but you – both of you – have been ‘pushing’ and ‘pushing’ since this started. I’m not being dragged into this any further. You’ll have to find another voice of reason.”

Natasha laughs. “Nice speech. You practice that?”

Sharon’s jaw clenches, anger and another raw, livid emotion pouring off of her in waves. I watch as she collects herself, heartrate slowing and tension dissipating. She has to work to keep her voice cool and dispassionate, and if the people in this room didn’t know her better than they know themselves, she would have pulled it off. 

“I said I’m not doing this. I meant it. You can ride with them, but I’m going home, taking a bath, and pleading plausible deniability for the rest of this mess.”

Natasha snorts and flings back a retort. Steve intercedes, and Sharon and Nat both turn on him. I ignore all of this and go to the window, the back of my neck prickling.

The street appears as deserted and empty as before, but as I focus, I sense two black vans, parked…I have to push to get to the information, past a wall of interference erected between my mind and what I want to know. Eventually, I break through. They’re parked around the corner, in a secluded lot behind a closed gelato place.

It takes even more effort to sense who’s inside the vans. I can hear the doors opening, footsteps on gravel, the distinct nylon shuffle of tactical gear, the sounds faint and distorted but still there. I can’t get to their faces, it hurts too much, a pressure building in my head when I try. I do know that there’s twelve of them.

And I don’t need any special skills to guess who sent them. Only one operation has the tech to keep me from spying.

“Hey,” I say, and the others abruptly quiet. “You’re a super soldier, an experienced spy, and a highly trained federal agent. You don’t notice the horde of Mercury narcs about to bust in on us?”

“No way,” Natasha says, moving to the window next to me. “It’s too quick.”

“Not if their base is closer to here than to Detroit,” Steve corrects. “If they scrambled another team immediately after the motel and tracked him here, it’s possible.”

“How many?” Sharon asks.

“Twelve, at least,” I say. “Heavily armed.”

“Bust the door down, leave no witnesses,” Natasha murmurs. “Apropos. I don’t see anyone.”

“You will soon enough.”

“Time?” Steve asks.

“They’re…” and I stop, a wave of pain crashing through my head. My knees go loose, and I catch at the window frame. ‘Around the corner’, I almost said, ‘Five minutes tops.’ But they aren’t around the corner.

They’re here. 

And they were able to trick me, mix up my perceptions. How, I can’t know, or begin to guess. 

Downstairs, a door bangs open. I hear a silenced shot, and a warm-bodied thud. A crackle of a comm. Footsteps on the stairs.

“They’re coming,” I manage, but that’s obvious to everyone now.

Natasha checks her magazine, clicks it back in place. Sharon hands Steve a round case she pulled from under the bed. “I brought this, just in case.”

Steve removes a shield and straps it on his arm, shiny red blue and silver, stronger than it has any right to be. It looks weirdly cartoonish and medieval in this tiny, creepy bedroom. He turns to me, and something about his carriage has shifted, his shoulders straightening, his chin lifting. I suddenly get the whole Captain America thing.

“Stay behind me,” he instructs, and I have no intention of doing anything different. 

Mercury has made it clear they want me dead, and for their own idiotic reasons, these people want to prevent that from happening. I can read a room just fine. 

“Broken sword formation?” Natasha asks. 

Steve flings out a clipped nod and Sharon simply moves to stand back and just behind Natasha. 

“Hold on kid,” Steve says, tugging the knife from his jeans and handing it to me. “Don’t use it unless you absolutely have to. And don’t lose my stuff this time.”

They’re outside the door, one on either side and one ready to breach. The interference swims in my head. I’m wasted on it. I can’t think. 

Without hesitating, Steve kicks down the door and slams the first guy into his buddy, sending them flying down the hall and into the window seat. Bullets whiz and ping off the shield, lodging in the pastel wallpaper and the glass in the antique picture frames, coming from three other people positioned on the landing. Steve rips the gun from the third guy’s hand and uses the shield to propel him down the hall toward the stairs, using the guy’s body as a shield against the still-flying bullets.

I keep behind him, staying out of his way, mimicking his movements as if I’m an unusually pale shadow. Behind us, Natasha and Sharon emerge, Natasha turning toward the people Steve has already dispatched behind us, Sharon providing cover fire over our shoulders. 

I don’t try and single out the sound of Natasha’s gun, but in the hail of gunfire, I hear the deliberate exit of her bullets from their chamber, followed by led plowing through bone and soft brain tissue, once and then twice.

But Steve moves down the stairs, keeping me between his back and the wall, deflecting the gunfire of the remaining Mercury lackeys in the lobby. Sharon catches one of them in the neck with a clean shot, blood spurting over the welcome desk and the neatly polished floors. He goes down clutching at the wound, but it doesn’t matter, because he’ll be dead in less than ten minutes.

Steve stays at the bottom of the stairs, hurling away one of the two people remaining as she launches herself at us, and she stumbles backward. Before she can regain her footing, Natasha appears at the top of the stairs, her expression an impenetrable mask, and shoots her. 

The mercenary’s head snaps back, and she crumples, blood pooling in a dark halo around her. Another shot, and the last man cries out, gun clattering to the floor, clutching at his hand.

“Sharon?” Natasha says in a detached, even voice.

“No, please,” the man whimpers, eyes darting from Natasha at the top of the stairs to Sharon partway down them, representations of one long ago choice and the fork diverging two equal and opposite paths.

Sharon clicks off her safety and lowers her gun in answer to Natasha’s question, something cooler than mercy glinting in her clear eyes.

“Fine,” Natasha says. The man dives for his gun, but it doesn’t matter. When he hits the ground, he’s dead as all the others, cheek pressed into the hardwood, eyes rolled up to the whites in his bullet-shattered skull.

“Guess I’ve got to do everything myself.” Natasha keeps her gun out, and Steve lets her by as she comes down the stairs, watches as she and then Sharon proceed to clear the rest of the house.

“No one else out on the street that I can see,” Natasha says, returning. “Was that seriously all they could come up with? I’m a little offended.”

“They didn’t know you were here,” Steve says, not quite joking.

“There’s a car in the garage,” Sharon adds, “A minivan. I grabbed the keys.”

Steve casts a glance around the carnage of the lobby, a muscle twitch in his throat the only sign of his distaste. He steps down, holding his hand out. I place the still-sheathed knife in it. It seems small in comparison to all of this, anyway.

An assassin in a back alley is one thing. This…is something else entirely. 

I stare at the mercenary with the neck wound, still twitching on the floor a few feet away, his body not yet caught up to the fact that he’s dead. The reek of gore is already heavy in the air. I think of Sarah Marshall’s last fractured breaths.

“Let’s go,” Steve says.

“I’m driving,” Sharon says, moving toward the kitchen.

Natasha follows her. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

“I changed my mind.”

Steve lets me go ahead of him, wary I’ll try and run again, but I trail mutely after the other two, too achy and sore and shocked to mount much of a protest. Darlene’s body has fallen behind the welcome desk, two dark splotches staining the back of her paisley vest, a phone lying inches from her slack, outstretched hand. Out of nowhere, I smell the cigarette and potpourri smell of my grandma’s sweatshirts, and I avert my eyes.

“Emmett,” Steve says quietly from behind me.

“I know,” I mutter. “I’m going.”

On the way to the garage, I trip over a water dish, soaking my shoes and scattering water everywhere.

I curse, and then I realize there’s a food dish to match, attached to an automatic feeder. The dishes are just next to the fridge, which has pictures stuck to it with fruit-shaped magnets. My chest bottoms out, something black and awful spilling through my gut.

I assumed that Harry – the name she mentioned to me and Steve when we checked in – was a husband, a son maybe. If I’d paid attention when she said it, I’d have known already. Harry isn’t a person. Harry, I realize with acute misery, is a cat. A shy tuxedo cat who prefers wet food and loves knocking the porcelain dolls off their perches and who Darlene dresses up in little matching paisley bowties.

“What is it?” Steve asks. 

“I’m not leaving.”

“What did you say?”

I turn to him, my voice strange in my own ears. “I said, I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving without the cat.”

“The cat?” Steve repeats, not following.

“Harry’s a cat,” I tell him, irritated. “He’s the owner’s cat, and we just shot up his house and got his owner killed. What’re we doing here anyway? You knew Mercury would come after us again.”

“Not like this,” Steve protests.

Sharon and Natasha emerge from the laundry room that leads out to the garage. “What’s going on?”

“I’m getting that cat.” I shoulder past Steve. He doesn’t really try and stop me, making a half-hearted grab for my arm.

“We don’t have time for this,” Sharon intones. 

I ignore all of them, picking my way back through the destroyed lobby. 

“She’s right. We can’t waste time searching this entire house for a cat,” Natasha says, the three of them still in the kitchen. “We don’t know how quickly Mercury will send backup.”

“You want to try and stop him?” Steve asks wearily. “Be my guest. That kid is like a freight train, and I’ve already stepped on the tracks twice already. Didn’t enjoy it either time.”

While they bicker, I tip my head, centering my focus. I’m not sure how or even if this will work on an animal, with no premonition to jumpstart the process, but then I hear a slight tinkling sound, like the bell I saw on Harry’s collar in the pictures on the fridge.

I find him in the pianoforte room, hiding under a display cabinet. When I kneel down, he hisses and backs himself further into the corner. I have to get on my stomach to see his eyes glowing in the dark under the cabinet, his hackles raised, his heart beating like a frenzied moth in his fuzzy chest.

“It’s not okay, kitty,” I murmur, resting my chin on my hands. “Everything is going to be different now. Bad shit happens and it happens all the time. That’s just the way it is. But if you come out from under there, Harry, I’ll get you somewhere safe, away from all the guns and blood, and you’ll probably be fine, because you’re a cat. Now c’mon, kitty. C’mon.”

Once a feral cat had a litter of kittens under a neighbor’s porch a few lots over from my and my grandma’s trailer. I and a couple of the other kids went over and played with the kittens almost every day until the woman whose porch it was got the mom cat spayed and gave the other kittens away to whoever could take them. There were four kittens in total, one black, two gray, and one marmalade yellow. I remember the way their tiny claws pricked my skin, the insistent squeak of their voices, the round buttons of their green and yellow eyes. They would climb up our shirts, nestle in our collars, gnaw at the broad knuckle of our thumbs. I didn’t ask my grandma if I could keep one, even though the lady whose porch it was offered the yellow kitten to me. I knew my grandma couldn’t feed a cat and me or fill my inhaler and also afford to take a cat to the vet to get shots. So I left the yellow cat behind and pretended I hadn’t named her.

Years later, a mangy tabby cat trailed Brandan, my only and would-be best friend, back to where we were both staying at the time. He was the sort of cat who liked to fight, stalked the streets looking for it, only one mean yellow eye and a ratty ear to show for it. He would hang around, pretend he didn’t see us when we walked by. I brought back a fifty-cent tin of cat food the first day I saw him, but he didn’t want that, pawing for the scraps from our dinners, bits of spam or tuna I’d feed him off my fingers. Brandan teased me for liking that cat so much. I didn’t mind. I called him Jimmy, after Jimmy Carter, even though our Jimmy was distinctly less pleasant than the former president. The only affection I ever saw him indulge in was when he’d rub his anvil of a head against Brendan’s legs, humming like a broken sowing machine. One day he just didn’t show up again. Or we didn’t show up again. The three of us were alike in that way, in our ability to just pull up stakes and go.

In the end, Harry comes out after only a couple minutes of coaxing, his hackles settling and his heart slowing before he creeps out tentatively, belly low to the ground.

“That’s it, guy,” I tell him, sitting up. He just stares at me, crouched down, tail swiping over the floor. Without having to look up, I sense Steve leaning in the entryway of the room, his silence taking up physical space.

“Sharon’s pulling the car around,” he says.

“Good for her.” I offer my hand to Harry, who sticks his whole head in it and then creeps up into my lap and stays there, claws dug into my pants, trembling.

“We need to go.”

“I didn’t ask you for any of this,” I say, stroking the cat’s head. “All I wanted to do was get away.”

“This is what getting away means,” Steve says. “You have to find a way to live with it.”

“You think I don’t know all that? I’m just saying I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. I didn’t ‘do’ this. Any of this,” I say, more to Harry than to him. “Whatever. I’m going to pick you up and I need you to be okay with it.”

Harry complies with this almost docilly, clawing up my shoulder to drape himself around my neck like a scarf. As he settles there, warm, I can feel his even breath, and I know the way I know everything that Darlene taught him to do this and that he trusts me.

I don’t know why. I don’t deserve it. 

“I need to do one more thing. It’ll be quick.” 

Steve doesn’t like this, but he doesn’t protest either, tracking me as I find a blood-splattered sharpie at the front desk and go back up the stairs to room 4. In the room, there’s a vanity, and I scrawl a note on the mirror for the hunter. I know, the way I know everything, that they will come and see this. Mercury tried to kill me without them, and this is the inevitable result of that mistake.

“Clever,” Steve comments, still lurking at my shoulder. 

“You’ve got your thing and I’ve got mine,” I say, dropping the sharpie on the vanity top.

We exit then, down the stairs, out the back door, and through the dead garden’s gate. An ugly maroon minivan idles on the curve, a ‘My Kid is My Cat’ bumper sticker peeling off the back window. Natasha pulls open the door from the inside and we climb in. It smells like apple car freshener and the plastic bags of dry cleaning still hung in the back. Sharon puts her foot on the gas, and the car trundles away, leaving the bloodbath at the B&B behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey again. 
> 
> Thanks for sticking around, I appreciate you. I won't see you until after December 25th, for the new weekly Tuesday upload on 12/28. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you're able to keep it in your way and find your version of peace and rest today and tomorrow. If you don't celebrate Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, etc. (I know Hanukkah is over at this point, so a belated happy holidays! I hope it was great!) However you do celebrate, I hope your celebration is meaningful and just what you want it to be. And if you don't celebrate at all, well, enjoy the day off. I hope it's restful and restorative for you.
> 
> I used the word hope a lot, and that's really the sentiment I want to emphasize. Life can be shitty, and has been shitty for a lot of us this past year. Whatever that looked like for you, I hope we can all find healing, communion, and justice in 2021. 
> 
> See you next week,
> 
> -Iz


	26. Black Coffee and the Urge to Self-Destruct

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha reflects on past mistakes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, welcome back. Behold, the new Tuesday upload! As usual, italics=single quotations. Onward, upward, etc.

[Natasha Romanoff POV]

Natasha comes out of the gas station, her arms full. The sky is gray and brutally cold, languid black pines and bright snow stretching forever in either direction alongside the sinuous wander of the lonely one-lane road. The gas station has proved the only change in scenery for miles now, and even it – a squat two-story building hunched in the middle-of-nowhere – seems forlorn and apocalyptic.

The one attendant, a grizzled old man in a deerstalker hat and an old button-down flannel, had checked her out with a grunt, a glazed look in his eye that Natasha was easily able to ascribe to the stink of weed, which lingered in the store and on his person.

He seemed not to even register her presence, rheumy eyes flicking over her as if she were just another display of last month’s hunting magazines. Natasha doesn’t mind. It means if anyone comes asking, the old man will likely not remember her or her companions in any detail. Still, it makes her feel like she might not be real, a sensation that shivers under her skin in tandem with the blast of bitter air as she exits, the bell ringing behind her.

Sharon stands by the morose minivan, hip propped next to the gas tank, ungloved hands tucked tight in her armpits. Her nose and cheeks are pink with cold, her lips chapped with it. She looks up as Natasha approaches, her expression remaining neutral, though her posture stiffens the slightest bit.

“Is that for me?” 

Natasha hands over the vat of black coffee she purchased inside. Sharon flips open the tab on the lid and taking a long pull, wincing at the searing heat.

“Not bad.”

“He made it fresh,” Natasha says. “Because I’m so pretty.”

“Hm.”

Sharon drinks her coffee black because her father drank it black, and she likes to be like him, tough and intense and no-nonsense. She likes to have him with her in this way, as if she can summon his fortitude simply by copying his coffee order. Her aunt drank a tall vanilla latte, extra shot of espresso, and she’ll have that, too, depending on the day and what it calls for. Her mother, saint that she was, drank non-caffeinated tea, and Sharon doesn’t drink that at all, an ache there that’s too deep to soothe with chamomile or concrete memory.

All of this Natasha learned slowly, over time. She could’ve figured it out herself, but she let Sharon tell her instead, and now she knows which drink is required when, can read it in the slightest slump of a shoulder, the tiniest twitch of the head, the slight fatigue that bunches in the corner’s of Sharon’s mouth when a migraine has started.

She thought the information would be useless after Sharon left, time spent and wasted on someone who was never going to stay, but Sharon takes a second swig of the coffee and maybe it’s not as hopeless as Natasha thought.

And she’ll never voice this aloud, or let Sharon read it on her, but the hope blooms quiet and secret in her chest, nonetheless.

“You shouldn’t encourage him,” Sharon says, and Natasha doesn’t understand until she points at the pack of cigarettes, just visible through the plastic bag.

“Give him a break,” she replies. “And anyway, they’re not just for him.”

“You quit,” Sharon tells her.

“Yeah, I did quit, and then I started again. What’s it to you?” 

Sharon shakes her head, exasperated. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“Welcome,” she grumbles.

The pump clunks as the tank finishes filling and Sharon puts it back, screws on the gas cap. Natasha prepaid inside, the filling station ancient and decrepit as everything else out here. 

“Why’re you here?” Natasha asks.

Sharon blows in her cupped hands, stomps her feet. The wind keens, eerie and sad. “You don’t remember? You abducted me against my will and brought me here. Then I got into a brutal firefight to help save your collective asses, and here I am.” She gestures at the desolate landscape. “Exactly where I didn’t want to be.”

“No, I mean…” Natasha sighs. “You had your chance to leave, back at the B and B, but you stayed. Or you came. Whichever.”

“It’s like negative five below out here. You really want to have this conversation now?”

Natasha just stands there, and she must look especially pathetic, because Sharon looks away, her mouth pressed in a tight line.

“The two of you always do this, you know,” she says. “You…you especially tend to get yourself in deep shit just to prove yourself right. You can’t believe that anyone would stick around for you, want to be with you, ‘love’ you, so you push and push and push until eventually every sane person you encounter learns their lesson and stays the fuck away.”

“Except for you.”

Sharon looks at her, a familiar melancholy in her dark eyes. “Except for me. I don’t like to lose people, Nat. You know that.”

“I do.” And she uses it, has used it, will probably continue to use it despite her best inclinations. Sharon’s the type of person who can’t leave anyone behind, even if they deserve it.

But Natasha has a handy knack of driving people to extremes they’d otherwise never reach, which is why Sharon finally left her.

She can’t blame her for it. But she also can’t manage to stay away, picking at the old wound just as it heals for no other reason than the novelty of seeing it bleed.

“Is it for me, then?” Natasha asks. “All this?”

“Maybe,” Sharon says. “And maybe it’s because I can’t leave you two ridiculous idiots alone in the middle of all this.”

“We survived without you before.”

“No, I was there that time, too,” Sharon corrects. “And so was Sam. And so was everyone who ever loved Captain freaking America. You had people on your side even then. You always have back-up. It’s just you that insists on trying to go it alone.”

“It’ll be the same this go-around, then.”

“Yeah,” she mutters. “I hope you’re happy with yourself.”

“Me? This is Steve’s mess. He started it.”

“And you enabled him,” Sharon says, “Because you were bored and were tired of taking the straight and narrow.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Since when have you been about anything as procedural as ‘fair’?” Sharon asks. “This was all destined to blow up. I told Tony that. I told Steve that. I told you that. But you’re all sadists in love with hurting yourselves, and what’s my good advice in comparison to all that? It’s freezing. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Natasha clambers into the back, because Steve has stolen the passenger seat. He ends a call as they get in, tucking his phone back into his pocket, and Sharon starts the car with a dry cough, cold air puffing out of the heaters.

“Thanks,” Steve says when Natasha hands up the pack of cigarettes and a pink Zippo lighter. 

“Not in the car,” Sharon tells him, her voice clipped. 

Steve glances between the two of him, brow furrowed in pretty concern, and Natasha knows more than suspects that he overheard the whole of their exchange.

“Everything all right?”

“Beautiful,” Natasha says, ripping into a bag of Funyons. 

“Don’t ask stupid questions, Steve,” Sharon tells him, pulling out of the gas station’s dirt parking lot with a spray of gravel from under the minivan’s tires.

In the backseat, the kid sits sprawled, the cat bundled up in his coat, fast asleep. His dark gray eyes are lidded and keen, and he watches this exchange with an almost amused glint in the corner of his thin mouth.

He sees Natasha staring at him and tips his head, the smirk more an idea than an actual expression. “Hey, does the radio work?”

Steve fiddles with it until he finds a grainy country station, the drawl of it flickering in and out of focus the deeper they get into the backcountry.

“You mind answering a few questions?” Natasha asks.

Steve flicks her a warning glance in the rearview mirror, which she avoids.

“Depends,” the kid says.

“On what?”

“On whether I like the questions or not,” he replies. 

“We could make it a game. Twenty questions.”

“I like games.” He has an incredulous twitch in his brow, like he knows that she knows that he’s too old for this kind of schtick to be anything but blatantly transparent, and he’s curious about the game she’s really playing.

“Why does Hydra want to kill you so bad?”

He snorts. “You think I know the fucking answer to that?”

“Nat,” Steve says from the front seat, voice tight.

“What?” Natasha insists. “What would you like me to do?”

“Leave him be, maybe,” Steve says.

“Really, Steve,” Sharon interjects. 

“What?”

“Nah, it’s all right,” the kid says from the back, voice slicing through the building tension like a propeller through stormy water. “Not like we can play the license plate game or A to Z out here, right? What is it you want to know?”

The easiness in his tone bothers all of them, in different ways. 

“Hydra wants you dead,” Natasha says. “Why?”

“I’m not exactly a loveable person,” the kid replies, gaze trained downward at the sleeping cat. He pets its head with two fingers, relaxed, almost serene.

“They’ve got other assets like you,” Natasha says. “So what makes you so special they’d rather get rid of you then bring you back into the fold?”

The kid shrugs. “I’m not really the person best-suited to answer that question.”

“Who is?”

“You,” he replies. “Aren’t you the ones with the connections and the resources? Who am I? Everyone I know is dead or gone and hates me anyway.”

“Oh, boo-hoo,” Sharon mutters.

The kid grins. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad for me. I’m just making a point.”

“I want to know what you think,” Natasha says, steering the conversation back on track. “It’s still your body, isn’t it? What did they do to you that makes you a threat to them?”

“You want to know what I think.” He tucks his coat more securely around the cat. “No you don’t. I’m not a real person to you, am I, Natasha Romanoff. I’m a threat.”

Both Sharon’s and Steve’s gazes flash into the rearview mirror. He should only know her first name. 

“You want to play it like that?” she asks.

“Not particularly,” he says mildly. “And isn’t it my turn to ask a question? I thought that was how this game worked.”

“We already know that you’ve got a level of precognition,” she tells him. “You knew the number of people Hydra had sent at the B and B. You knew how they were armed. You knew who that asset was back at the motel with Steve immediately.”

“Aw, Steve,” he says, deadpan, “Did you rat me out? I thought we were better pals than that.”

Steve shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He knows that the kid wants to make him feel guilty, and also that the kid had no pretenses about what Steve would do with the information the kid gave him. He has fulfilled the kid’s expectations of him, and this will make Steve feel bad, because he wants to be the good guy to everybody in every circumstance. It’s an annoying flaw of his.

“Yeah I can do that,” the kid continues. “Big whoop. So can they.”

“The other asset? The one like you?”

“Mm-hmm. Nothing special about me, sorry to say. I’m just your run-of-the-mill superpowered bad guy.”

“Why do you say ‘they’?”

“Because I can sense gender, too,” he says. “How very progressive of Mercury to give me that ability when they kidnapped me from prison and turned me into a weapon. Do I get a question now?”

“Sure, fine. What?”

“Do you just get numb to it?”

“Numb to what?”

“Killing people,” the kid says. “After a certain number of times doing it, does the feeling you get when you do it just go away?”

Up front, Steve stiffens, and Sharon’s knuckles go white around the wheel.

“Your girlfriend is disgusted by me,” the kid tells her, “And Steve has to believe I haven’t done anything atrocious in order to rationalize his willingness to put everything on the line for me. I just find this ironic, given that I remind you of yourself.”

Natasha’s pulse increases, and her thoughts, though still cool, go haywire. 

“There’s a difference between me and you, and you know it.”

“Sure I do. You were trained for it. Brainwashed. Molded. You didn’t have to be this way, right? You wouldn’t have been this way had the KGB never gotten their hands on you, right?” His grin flickers in and out of a pained grimace.

“What are you trying to do, Emmett?” Natasha asks him.

He shakes his head. “Oh. Nothing. Just…what if I’m telling the truth about being innocent? And what if I’m not? What makes a person deserve something like this? Because that’s what you think, isn’t it, at least on some level. That I deserve this.”

“This isn’t an undergrad philosophy course,” Sharon says.

“Then what is it? Do any of you really understand why you’re here?”

As if on cue, Sharon swerves, the minivan bucking into the other empty lane until she manages to wrestle the wheel under control again. She pulls off the road as much as she can with the heaps of snow piled along either side, flicks the hazards on. It has long since grown dark, the sky black and starless. The blink of the hazards blurs huge shadows through the trees, their edges hazed with orange. Steve turns on the cab light.

“What’s wrong? Sharon?”

She puts a hand to her head, her brow tense with pain. “It’s a migraine. It just came on really suddenly, it’s not a big deal.”

“Do you have your meds?”

“Yeah, they’re in my bag.”

The kid sits quietly, calming the mewing cat, watching as Steve digs through the bag at his feet and pours out a pill, hands it to Sharon along with a half-empty water bottle.

“This isn’t going to do shit,” she mutters, mostly to herself. “Jesus. This is what I get for hanging out with you people.”

“You want me to drive?” Steve asks.

“Yeah. Thanks.” 

They switch, cold air rushing back into the car as doors open and shut, hazards still going, the road still perilously empty. A pressure has started to build in Natasha’s head and chest, and she for no real reason recalls an empty room, dust swirling through shafts of light, the wall of mirrors, the barre. She remembers wandering through that room, pirouettes and jetes still in her feet, that old grace still in her hands.

All she knew then was that she had to go back to that place, and she had to do it alone. It was something she owed to herself, less an explanation than a sort of fraught forgiveness. Being there didn’t blot out all the debts she still owed, but it reframed them, made them ugly and understandable.

Before Steve can put the car back into drive, she reaches forward, more on finely tuned instinct than anything else. “Wait. Sharon, your nose is bleeding.”

Sharon reaches for the cab-light, still on, but stops and touches her face, looks at Nat in dazed confusion. “I don’t understand.”

Natasha feels a warm trickle and staunches it with her sleeve. “Fuck.”

Steve looks between them, alarmed. “This shouldn’t be happening.”

“Talk to boy wonder,” Natasha spits.

“Emmett…” Steve pauses and puts a hand to his ear. His fingers come away red. It all feels like something that has happened before. 

“Give me the tranquilizer,” the kid says sharply. They all look at him, the light in his eyes fevered and unwell. “I know you still have it. It’s in that bag with her meds. Give it to me. Right now.”

“Why?” Natasha demands. The blood flow has gotten heavier and the car spins around her. Each thought comes farther and farther apart, sluggish.

“For fuck’s sake,” the kid mutters, and removes the cat from his lap, the cat whose little pink nose is bleeding, too. He clambers toward the front of the minivan, and Natasha thinks she should stop him, but doesn’t, thought and action firmly disconnected from one another. 

Only Steve manages to move, gripping the back of the kid’s neck like he’s an unruly kitten. 

“You shouldn’t,” he says, “Not so soon after you’ve already been dosed.”

“Let me go, Steve,” the kid says softly.

Steve does. The kid rummages and comes up with the tranquilizer, as if he knew exactly where it was all along, the needle and the green liquid glowing in the uncanny yellow of the car light.   
And then he plunges it into his own thigh. 

“You’re welcome,” he slurs. “I hate all of you.”

He proceeds to crawl into the back seat and pass out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, y'all. I'll see you on Thursday for the second weekly upload. 
> 
> On a personal note, I've really loved writing Natasha and Sharon's relationship/characters and I am really proud of this chapter in particular. You know when you're writing and you come out on the other side and you're like - wow, I did that? That's what this chapter feels like to me.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you have a great week if you can. As always, I appreciate you being here. Thanks for sticking around, etc.
> 
> -Iz


	27. New Aftermaths & Old Aftershocks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve finds himself wrestling with what he's left behind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back! Happy New Year's Eve. As usual, single quotations = italics. I'll see you on the other side, etc.

[Steve Rogers POV]:

It takes them an hour after the incident to reach their intended destination. The rest of the drive is spent in silence. Sharon sits in the passenger seat, arms crossed tight over her body, frown trained sightlessly on the dark road stretching out in front of them. Natasha moves to the very backseat with the kid, keeping an eye on him to make sure the tranquilizer he took doesn’t have any adverse effects.

So far, it seems only to have knocked him out. When Steve glances in the rearview mirror, he can just see the two of them dimly. Natasha has laid the kid out, using a wool blanket from the trunk to cover him up. Without the help of daylight to remind of the translucence of his skin or the uncanniness in his eyes, he looks like any other teenager zonked out on a too long road trip.

Every so often, Natasha checks his vitals with a reluctance that surprises Steve. She takes his pulse while looking at her watch for the seconds, nonplussed by the warmth and humanness of him. Up close, he is more child than monster or criminal or anything else. 

Natasha is used to her adversaries and her friends being made up of hard edges, any incongruity blatant and clear-cut.

Not so with Emmett Faust. The cat has cuddled up near his face, tucking its fuzzy head under his chin. The rumble of its purr undergirds the noise of the engine.

This also seems out-of-sync with what reality should be, but there’s nothing for it.

Steve exits the narrow highway into another middle-of-nowhere stretch of nothing. It’s well after midnight. There is a gas station next to a mechanic’s garage and an accompanying scrapyard, all of it dull and dark. 

Houses are rare, the occasional mailbox the only sign that there is anyone else alive out here, the mailboxes themselves mostly lost in the huge drifts of snow siphoned to the side of the road.

Another few miles and Steve turns onto a barely-there dirt road, the kind that normally has knee-high weeds growing in the space between the wagon ruts. It has been meticulously cleared of snow, a local paid to take care of the work by the owner of the property.

The side mirrors pass mere inches from the needled branches of the pine trees that make up miles of dark forest on either side of them. Steve can feel the tires sinking into the fresh layer of snow fallen earlier that day as he makes his way slowly up the winding drive.

He pulls in front of a small white house with a sagging screened-in front porch. It’s worn and in need of a paintjob, the roof patchy from missing shingles. He parks the car in the open space in front of the house that has also been cleared out by the same neighbor, who comes by once a week or so to run the water, make sure the pipes don’t freeze and that no vermin have gotten down the chimney. Booted footprints lead to and from the front door, firewood stacked in a little hutch next to porch. 

“Cozy,” Natasha comments.

Steve grunts in response. Sharon sighs. In unison, they make the decision to start unloading the car. Sharon grabs their scant baggage. Natasha keeps hold of the now-hostile cat, who doesn’t enjoy being separated from Emmett. Steve carries Emmett, lighter than he should be, wrapped up in the blanket like a hypothermia victim.

He trails Sharon, who mounts the front steps and opens the porch door with a wheezy screech. 

The porch itself is empty except for a heavy wooden coffee table and two metal lawn chairs, both rusting where they sit. An ugly gnome with the paint peeling from its white Santa beard grins up at them from beside the main door.

Sharon nudges the gnome aside with her foot and picks up a key, hefting it in one hand before she fits it into the lock and pushes open the door. They file inside, Sharon fumbling as she flicks on a lone, bare-bulbed light, illuminating a tiny coatroom, a large-basined sink and washing board taking up most of the space.

“I’m going to go turn on the water, put wood in the stove,” she says.

“You want any help?” Natasha asks, grip a little desperate on the cat, who lashes its puffed tail with resentful fury.

“No, you go ahead,” Sharon says. “I need a couple minutes to myself anyway. Make yourselves at home.”

They proceed down the narrow hallway while Sharon disappears back into some sort of utility closet. They pass a cupboard sized bathroom and a linen closet before they emerge into an open room that includes both the living room and the kitchen. Two bedrooms branch off from the back of the living room on either side of the couch.

Across from the couch crouch two worn recliners, accompanied by a smudged glass coffee table and a tacky blue lamp sitting on a side table. The kitchen has a refrigerator and a wood stove, the counter green tile and the floor peeling linoleum.

Steve lays the kid on the couch and Natasha releases the cat, who jumps immediately up next to Emmett.

“What now?” Steve asks.

Natasha glances around the space, hands on her hips. Moonlight glances in from the window above the sink, making everything hazy and blue.

“Catch a few hours of sleep,” she says, “Take shifts watching the kid?”

He nods, rubbing a tired hand over the back of his neck. “Sounds good to me. Man, I’d kill for a shower right now.”

“Then have I got news for you,” Sharon chimes in, emerging behind them with her winter coat still on, lugging an armful of wood. “I just turned on the water. You can wait until morning or give it a few minutes to heat up.”

“Who’d this place belong to again?” Steve asks.

Sharon goes about loading the wood into the stove, most of her attention on the activity rather than her answer. “My aunt’s husband’s brother. He was a bachelor, had one kid who’s now some hotshot stockbroker, according to the Christmas cards. This place has remained in his name since my great-uncle died a few years ago, but he doesn’t want the bother of the place, so my sister Hope pays to upkeep it.”

“Why don’t you sell it?”

“We’re a sentimental lot, us Carters,” Sharon says, wiping her hands on her jeans. She straightens, a warm yellow glow seeping from the front of the stove before she shuts the door. “There’s a lot of history here. And who knows? My cousin’s kid might want to see this place someday.”

The story lends a little normalcy to the bizarre turn of the last few days. 

Steve takes first shift, sitting in one of the recliners across from the kid while Natasha showers and Sharon pokes around the cabin, retrieving armloads of blankets and dropping them on the coffee table before she sinks into the other recliner.

Silence like that which took up the car the last few hours returns. The only real light comes from the moon shining through the window above the sink. The dim yellow glow of the fire in the woodstove joins it, the shadows it makes clean-edged and black as pitch.

When Natasha emerges, rubbing a towel over her hair, Steve takes her place.

The bathroom is tiny, and tinny, and Steve schools his movements into increments to keep from knocking into the toilet or sink. The water itself is lukewarm and runs cold in the five minutes before he gets out, but he doesn’t mind.

He knows he’s mostly made up the stink of gore and sweat that has lingered since the fight at the B&B. Still. It’s a relief to wash it away, even if it’s mainly old memory rather than reality that lingers in his nose and turns his stomach.

Sharon decides to wait until morning to shower, washing her face in the sink before she comes out, hair slightly damp at the nape of her neck from where she’s splashed it, a well-worn effort to cool the body down, jumpstart it back into recognizing reality.

They all know the trick and they know better than to comment on it now. 

Natasha has taken the other recliner. Sharon props herself against the entryway to the kitchen. She has found a moth-eaten cardigan somewhere in the bowels of the cabin and pulled it over her shoulders. The moonlight shines from behind her, halos her head in silver, flyaways illuminated in filaments of light.

Again, that silence returns. In it, Steve can hear the even, low breath of the child asleep on the couch. His face is turned into the cushion, his lips slightly parted with sleep.

Steve remembers the crime scene pictures Sharon gave to him, even now tucked away in the interior of his coat draped over the back of this chair.

Lots of people forget, but soldiers are so often more children than men. He has seen plenty of horror in his time, given and received by kids who hadn’t yet learned what real life looked like. He has been one of those kids. He has seen evil willfully meted out for the sake of itself, for the sake of power. He has seen people who do evil because they were asked to do it. He has seen people who do it because they wanted to do it. He has seen people who do it because they believed they had no other choice.

And he has seen what Emmett has done, and he doesn’t know.

“We need to talk,” he says. “Something isn’t right. I can feel it.”

“Steve,” Natasha says. Just his name. She picks at her nails almost unconsciously, a vicious habit she’s had as long as he has known her. 

“You saw him,” Steve persists. “You felt it too. Didn’t you?”

Sharon shakes her head wordlessly.

“What did you see?” He pauses, looking between them. Neither woman will meet his eyes. “He didn’t do it on purpose. If you ask me, I don’t think he knew he could do it at all.”

“Do what?” Sharon asks sharply. “What ‘did’ he do? What do you call shit like that? We found nothing, ‘nothing’ that pointed to anything like this as remotely a possibility. If we knew Mercury could do something like this –”

She stops herself. There is no conclusion to reach, no end to that sentence. It is all one deep well of impossibility.

“This isn’t Mercury’s style,” Natasha says. “This isn’t ‘Hydra’s’ style. This shit is way too subtle for them. Too intimate. They wouldn’t know what to do with a resource like this.”

“We would be dead right now if he hadn’t stopped himself. All three of us,” Steve says.

The fact of it is irrefutable. The three of them know what death feels like when it comes, an inevitability staved off at the last second, or not. If it was anything for them like it was for him, that moment in the minivan would’ve felt like an ending.

It felt real. Realer than a memory or a dream, but far away at the same time. It called a split-second back to mind, a split second which is also an infinite moment that Steve can never seem to leave behind, a split-second which became vivid and bitter once again in the dark cab of the minivan on the shoulder of that empty, snowy road.

It is the second between when Bucky fell and when Steve couldn’t see him anymore. A second made of reaching, the look on Bucky’s face, his outstretched arm, Steve’s empty hands, the train rushing onward, the noise of the mountain wind in his ears, a sort of raucous silence made of sound.

And in that second, when Steve knew with all his heart he would never see his friend again, he lived a thousand other seconds. A million. An absolute lifetime of seconds, some real and some so concrete in their possibility it felt like a sort of dying to contemplate them. That single, isolated second between when Bucky was there and when he was gone forever filled to bursting with all those others.

They include the sound of Bucky breathing in the dark of Steve’s old Brooklyn apartment, his silhouette on the couch, the reassurance of the rise and fall of his chest, and the ache Steve felt in his own body. Like he didn’t deserve to have a friend like that. Like maybe the same as everything else that friendship and that person would disappear if he dared to fall asleep.

They include the ache in his calves as he climbed up that grassy hill toward the two quiet tombstones. His mother laid next to his father in the soft spring earth, and Bucky beside him, holding an armful of the flowers his mother loved so much. The flowers his father would bring home when the air warmed and the sky thawed, flowers which they then laid carefully on top of his parents’ grave.

They include the everyday, suffocating reality of waking up into a world that didn’t make sense. How could he be alive and the best person he knew be dead? He kept telling everyone that Bucky was the good one, but no one understood, because he wasn’t their best friend. The person who had loved him and stuck by him, who knew him better than he knew himself, and vice versa. That sort of loyalty was omnipotent, irreplaceable. Not everyone got to experience it. Not everyone who experienced it got to keep it, him among that number.

All those moments wrapped up into that one. 

It made a terrible sort of sense, then, when he faced the endless sheet of ice as that plane dove out of the sky, the sense solidifying into a certainty he felt in his chest. He knew what he had to do. He knew what he had to lose. And he didn’t do it for Bucky, exactly. At that point, Bucky was gone, and he was there, and the decision was his alone to make. But it wasn’t lost on him that he also fell into a cold light, an endless stretch of snow. He also would be lost, and hopefully – for him at least - never found.

That ending had a poetry to it. In an ideal world, there would’ve been no war and no loss and no sacrifice. But in the world they got, that ending held as much meaning in it as it could. It was right. And then it was over.

But then Steve woke up.

He woke up into a time and a life that didn’t belong to him. Into the possibility of a world for which he had died but never dreamed he would see. And then Bucky came back, into that space where it and they were all wrong, and he looked in Steve’s face like he was nothing. So Steve tried his best to fix it. He did the right thing. And still. Still. Nothing made sense. 

All those moments, his whole life it seemed like, wrapped up in that one split-second. Bucky here, and Bucky gone. 

If you had asked Steve before he went down with that plane so many years ago, he would’ve sworn on his life that he’d never leave Bucky behind. Never. He’d rather die than do that shit.

And now? 

Now. Steve can’t figure out what to do except leave. Nothing has been clear for a long time, and he doesn’t know how to untangle the knot of rights and wrongs in his chest. He doesn’t know which is which anymore.

Whatever the kid did in the minivan, it brought all of that back. The confusion, the loneliness, the grief all tangled up in that one split second. 

“I think it was a sort of telepathic refraction,” Sharon says quietly. “He was able to project what he felt in that moment onto us.”

“No. That’s not possible,” Natasha says, frowning at the bundle of blankets and even breath on the couch. “That level of intensity…he’s eighteen years old. It isn’t possible.”

“Not to mention,” Steve adds, “He did it for a ‘reason’, even if it wasn’t intentional. What was the reason? What did he project? We’ve all dealt with people who use pain and fear to manipulate, to exert control, as a sort of revenge – I’m going to make you feel the way that I felt. Tit for tat. This…it wasn’t that. It was earnest, an effort at communication.”

“Normally, I’d argue with you,” Sharon says. “Maybe it’s just…I don’t know. You’re right, at least, about how none of this felt premeditated.”

“The most dangerous thing in the world to that kid is the act of being vulnerable,” Natasha agrees. “He would never expose himself like this unless he thought it would get him something just as valuable. What is that in this scenario? Our trust? Our belief that he’s not really guilty? He’s made it clear he doesn’t give a shit about either of those things.”

“And now we have even more reason to lock him away, restrain him,” Sharon says, frowning.

Steve sighs. “He knew that when he went for the tranquilizer. He had to have known that.”

“It’s a miracle he isn’t dead,” Sharon murmurs.

They all sit with this for a minute. 

“Who is this kid?” Steve asks finally. 

“I think we have to give serious consideration to the theory that he isn’t guilty of those four murders back in ’89,” Natasha says. “I’ve been thinking about it, and a lot of it just doesn’t add up. At all. It might also explain why…why he’s here. If he was supposed to be a cold-blooded murderer, and he wasn’t, then what sort of wrench does that throw into what Mercury was trying to do with him?”

“Did the EU know about this when they freed him?” Steve asks. “If they did, that’s a whole other set of questions.”

“It’s late,” Sharon comments at last. “And we’re safe. Or safe for now. It won’t do us any good to waste the rest of the night banging our heads against a wall. We can get some sleep and reconvene in the morning, figure out what happens next.”

She’s right, but then again, Sharon is rarely ever wrong.

“Someone should stay with the kid,” Steve says. “How long have we got until morning?”

Natasha checks her watch. “Four hours, give or take.”

“I can take the first shift,” Sharon volunteers. “Don’t argue with me, it isn’t a big deal. Just go get some sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s your turn.”

Steve tamps down the argument he was just about to voice and obeys. Nat goes into one room, and he goes into the other. The bed is a double, thick with patched quilts and a foam mattress pad. He stumbles into it, pulls the blankets over his head. The warmth gathers around him immediately. It is easier than he thinks it will be to fall asleep.

When he does, he dreams of that split second up on the mountain, that endless stretch of snow.

He dreams of Bucky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, hey! Thanks for sticking around. Here's hoping that we make it to 2021 at 12:00 and aren't stuck in a purgatorial time loop. 
> 
> If we make it, I'll see you for the next upload on Tuesday (1/5). 
> 
> As always, I appreciate your being here. Have an awesome weekend if you're able. 
> 
> -Iz


	28. Little Love Notes and Other Savageries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Elian picks his poison

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey y'all. welcome to this week's tuesday upload. not much to say. no italics this go-around, so full steam ahead. see you in a minute.

[Elián Castillo aka the Hunter (OC) POV]

It is midmorning when I arrive in the small tourist town near Lake Huron. The town itself is quiet, despite the massacre that has just occurred within it. When I arrive at the B&B, a few bundled townspeople stand outside the crime-scene tape, chilled and apprehensive.

I amble up, adjusting my posture and my gait, nodding at a stout, red-nosed man as I duck beneath the tape and approach the house itself. Elijah follows after me, looking put-out and pissy. Today is normally his day off, but Shaw has dispatched him to babysit me, a state of events neither one of us enjoys.

If it comes down to it, I can shake off Elijah as easily as I can get rid of any other tail, but for now I’ll let him follow me around and step on my heels. It gives Shaw, or more aptly, her superiors a peace of mind. I don’t need to read their emotions to know that. It’s obvious. After Faust’s escape and the catastrophe that has followed, the corporate types at Mercury have grown even more jittery than usual.  
We show our badges at the door and are let into the heart of the scene.

It is cold inside from all the comings and going of the assorted members of the local police force and crime scene techs, the absence of the strong lake wind lending a heavy silence to the affair.  
There is a sort of numb shock which penetrates the walls and the floor, a sense of disbelief. This makes sense. A town this size probably isn’t used to run-of-the-mill violence, let alone a grisly spectacle like this. 

Most of the bodies have already been transported to the local morgue, including the only civilian casualty, the owner of the B&B. Blood still covers most surfaces, pools of it dried to a black skim at the top. The lace tablecloth in the dining room and the abundance of antique dolls makes everything that much more macabre. It won’t be much of a stretch now to market it as a haunted house, if any market-savvy real-estate agent manages to flip it after all of this.

I stand observing the scene while Elijah talks to the detective in charge, a heavy-set man with a five o’clock shadow and a world-weary paunch. The man glances over at me, skepticism lingering at his edges. Technically, I am young, and I look it, hardly able to pass for my real age, let alone the cover story Mercury has concocted to get us in here.

Still. The detective – Detective O’Reilly, I hear Elijah call him – has more important things to worry about today than me. He dismisses Elijah with a flip of his hand and goes to consult with an imported blood-spatter analyst in the kitchen.

“He reckons that the black ops guys were laid out in ten minutes tops,” Elijah tells me in a low voice. “They tried to breach a room at the top of the stairs, and then the people in it – hard to tell how many, he says – took down three of the black ops folks up on the landing and then made their way downstairs, where they took out the rest of the ops guys. Thirteen people total.”

“Baker’s dozen,” I comment, which elicits a disgusted look from a tech poking around for who knows what at the computer at the front desk. “What about the owner?”

“What about her?” Elijah asks, not following. He shakes out his third piece of nicotine gum this morning and pops it, his glower murderous.

“I mean, do they know who killed her? Was it the ops team? Was it the people they were after? Was it crossfire?” 

He shrugs. “Didn’t ask.”

“Mm. Where was her body found?”

He jerks his chin toward the desk. “Back there. Right, champ?”

The tech behind the front desk hesitates, fingers hovering over the computer’s keyboard. “Yes. But I don’t know anything about that.”

“It’s all right, we’re not asking you,” I say. “Could you move for a second?”

He looks to one of the cop’s still in the room who makes a face of incompetent acquiescence, and steps out of the way, hovering and twisting his fingers. I ignore him, focusing on the space itself. 

“She was taken by surprise,” I say after a moment. “They took her out when they breached.”

“Fuck,” Elijah murmurs.

“How do you know that?” the tech asks.

“She was found face down, wasn’t she?” I reply, looking to him. He doesn’t quite meet my eyes. “And the landline was found nearby? She heard it when they kicked in the door and had a few seconds to get to the phone but not to dial before they reached her.”

All of this is correct, and the tech exchanges a furrowed glance with the cop. 

“What does all that matter?” Elijah asks.

“I think it’s significant. Don’t you?”

Both of us know that official procedure states that civilians are to remain unharmed if at all possible. Ops didn’t bother to try protecting this woman, her death unremorseful and deliberate. This is evidence of a: that the playbook has changed dramatically and b: that no one bothered to inform me of this change.

Possibly they believed it wouldn’t matter. 

“Very interesting,” he mutters. “You wanna get upstairs now, wonder boy?”

“Don’t get an attitude with me, Eli. You know better.”

This makes him bristle, but he doesn’t respond, chomping away at his gum. The tech and cop watch us climb the stairs, gazes weighty.

“You knew, didn’t you?” I say to him once we reach the landing. No one besides us is upstairs, and a window has been broken, allowing a frigid breeze to infiltrate the hall. 

“Yeah. So what?”

“Nothing,” I say, shoving my hands in my coat pockets. I’m wearing street clothes today, and it feels strange. No stranger than this revelation: that I have been shut out of the happenings at Mercury. I wonder if Shaw knows.

What exactly do they think my reaction would be, if they did tell me about the change in policy? It has to have been in effect for a while now, judging by the brand of hostility rolling off of Elijah right now. Even his suppressant can’t hide it fully.

Aside from purely utilitarian concerns, why would they think I would care – or fight – a policy change of this nature, considering my origins and what I have done for the company? But I don’t have to ask this question. I know why. Mercury is changing tracts, and I am on my way out. Or I was, until Ops butchered what should have been an easy mission and lost twelve highly trained specialists in a spectacle that will no doubt dominate local and maybe even state-wide news unless Mercury can get a handle on it. 

I enter Room #4, the door knocked off its hinges. The inside looks relatively undisturbed, aside from the pillows knocked off the wicker chair onto the floor and the distinct smell of Nautica Voyage cologne lingering in the air. Our people never got this far.

Which is why I know that the message left of the vanity mirror is for me. 

The message itself is simple. Two words scrawled in spiked, spidery writing I wouldn’t have matched with Faust unless I already knew it was him.

‘Hi Babe’ it says, followed by ‘XOXO’ and then a cheeky smiley face.

“Aw,” Elijah says from the doorway. “Someone likes you.”

“He’s mocking me,” I say quietly.

“That tracks,” Elijah says, unimpressed. “You got his scent? Can we go? This place is giving me the creeps.”

He means all the dolls and spooky antique pictures, not the leftover blood spatter.

“Not yet,” I say. Without yet knowing why, I add, “Did the owner have a cat?”

“Why would I know that?”

I don’t respond. I know the owner had a cat and I am almost certain that Emmett Faust and friends took the cat with them. Curious but not vital information.

Beyond that, I know they left their respective vehicles and took the owner’s minivan, which has no GPS and cannot be tracked, outside a traffic camera catching the license plate as they left town.

Emmett wouldn’t know where they were going. It would be Steve Rogers leading the charge on that front, or one of his companions, who we haven’t identified for certain but have narrowed down to Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow, who is supposed to be in this area and an ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. agent named Sharon Carter known to be friendly with both Rogers and Romanoff in the past. 

Both have been reported to be close enough to this mess to have actually gotten sucked into it.

“I need something one of them touched recently,” I say. 

“Like that?” Elijah asks, gesturing at the throw pillows strewn over the floor. 

I kneel down and pick one up. It has been embroidered with plum-colored thread which dictates a cheery saying about what makes a house a home. I pick up on a faint aura, acerbic nature, and get a glimpse of a red-haired woman in my mind’s eye.

“Well?”

I can track her with relatively little difficulty. They’ll be going north, not toward any metropolitan areas, and this gives me an advantage. There’s less interference as the landscape grows more deserted, meaning that I have a better likelihood of finding traces of her or the others along the way.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve got her.”

“Then let’s get out of here.”

I turn the pillow over in my hands, diplomatic. “No. I don’t think so.”

He straightens in my peripheral, voice sharp. “What’s that supposed to mean, pal?”

“Don’t call me pal,” I say, standing again. “We’re not friends.”

He observes me, arms crossed, dark gaze mercenary and merry.

“You know I can take you down no problem,” he says. “One click of a button, you’re out.”

“Your little taser,” I say, facing him. “I know. How many volts does that thing pack? Enough to turn me off and back on again. Right? A little mindwipe for the road?”

He does not like the casual lilt of my tone, and wants to reach for said taser, but also doesn’t want to give himself away. The suppressants are a neat, headache inducing idea, but they only work if the assets gifted with them aren’t bumbling and obvious.

Elijah has never been subtle. That’s not the point of him.

“It’s all right, you don’t have to check.”

He curses and backs a step up, but it’s too late. 

I launch myself over the bed, landing lightly, taser in hand, facing him in a crouched stance, as if he’s an unruly animal. He lunges, slams me into the door jamb, trying to knock the taser out of my grip. He fails, and anyway, I’ve already driven the taser into his side, right where he would hit me if the tables were turned. 

I’ll be honest. Before I send the electricity coursing through him, I don’t know if it will kill him or not. I know the odds aren’t good. But he’s in good shape, relatively young, and his heart starts beating again after a brief stutter.

I catch him before he hits the ground, lower him gently, and roll him under the bed. The lacy bed skirt does more than enough to hide him.

“Is everything all right up there?” the cop from downstairs calls up.

“A-okay,” I respond, “Just knocked into the door on accident. Scene’s fine.”

He should be up here with us supervising, but he’s not. This is an issue of sheer laziness and also vague fear. Normal, non-Mercury-chipped people cannot abide being around me for long periods of time. It’s an interesting psychic effect, but not one that I cause intentionally.

The room’s window is easy enough to open, the jump itself not bad at all. I pocket Elijah’s keys and clamber out. 

Elijah’s work phone has Shaw’s number as the last called. I dial it again, listening to it ring as I walk back to the car we drove out here. She picks up on the third ring.

“Hi,” I say. “It’s me.”

“What did you do?” she demands.

“He’s not dead. At least not at the moment,” I say. “And you’ll know where I am. A babysitter will only get in the way.”

“Elián.” Her voice sinks into my chest like a blade. My heart shreds itself on it.

“Faust got the better of me last time,” I say. “I can’t let that stand. And an idiot like Elijah will keep me from doing what I need to do. Tell me you don’t agree.”

She considers this. “You understand that if you fail, I won’t be able to protect you. The only way either of us comes out of this clean is if you come back with Faust’s head on a platter.”

“I won’t fail,” I say. “I’ve learned my lesson.”

“I can cover you for forty-eight hours,” she tells me. 

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. You still are actively defying me, putting my neck on the line, and you know how I feel about that,” she says. “I cannot come down on you lightly.”

“I understand. But Shaw?” She doesn’t reply, but I know she’s listening. “Corporate seems to be under the impression that they can keep secrets from me. I would disavow them of that notion, especially if they want me to continue to clean up their messes.”

I hang up before I can hear her reply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as usual, thanks for sticking with me. I'll see you on thursday. happy tuesday. have a good week if you're able, and I'll be back shortly. 
> 
> -iz


	29. Maybe I Should Stop Missing You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve finally phones home, and Bucky remembers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey hey hey, y'all. Another Thursday, another chapter. Italics = single quotations. Proceed! I shall see you on the other side, etc.

[Bucky Barnes POV]

The apartment is quiet. Sam has gone out to clear his head and pick-up coffee. Bucky stayed behind hoping maybe this morning the phone would ring again. And it does.

He picks up.

“Steve?”

“Hi, Buck.”

The sound of his voice settles something in Bucky, calms him and roots him. He leans his elbows forward on the coffee table, bent double, his forehead pressed into the palm of his free hand, eyes squeezed shut in a sort of brutal relief.

“Where are you?” he asks because the connection has a tenuous, staticky quality that suggests it may be dropped at any time. “Did you make it?”

“Yeah, we made it. I’m up on the roof. Service is bad out here.”

“Who’s with the kid?”

Steve pauses. “Natasha, I think. We’re taking shifts. He’s out right now, on the couch. Did I tell you that he took the owner’s cat from the B&B?”

“No.”

“Well, he did. He wouldn’t let us leave until he found it. It’s curled up on his chest, won't leave him alone.”

“Weren’t you allergic to cats?”

He laughs. “Yeah, I used to be. Not so much anymore.”

So much has changed. Neither of them can say it.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called.”

“It’s all right,” Bucky says, even though it isn’t. “You were busy.”

Guilt clogs the line. “Yeah. I know. Hey, so, any progress on getting out of New York?”

“I emailed Wanda. She was hesitant at first, but she agreed eventually because Tony’s been sort of a dictator lately, keeping the facility locked down.”

“There is a pandemic going on,” Steve points out fairly.

“Except Tony gets to come and go as he pleases, and he plays teacher’s pet with his favorites,” Bucky says. “Which is a bit obnoxious of him. God, can you imagine how unbearable he’ll be if he and Bruce cure this thing?”

“Net good for humanity, but he’ll hold that over our heads for the rest of time.”

“I miss you.”

Steve is quiet for long enough that Bucky thinks the call has dropped. Then he says, so quiet it’s almost impossible to catch, “I miss you too. Um. There’s something I wanted to tell you. I thought maybe you could update Sam on it later. Is he there?”

“No. He’s out. Should be back in a few minutes. What is it?”

“Last night, on our way up here, something happened. We’re alright now, and there doesn’t seem to be any long-term effect, but it might help explain why Mercury wants to neutralize the kid so badly.”

Bucky’s pulse increases despite the placating calm in Steve’s voice. “What happened?”

“I said we’re all fine,” Steve repeats, as if this will do anything to quell Bucky’s nerves. “Natasha started asking him questions, which we think is what triggered it. The first symptom was from Sharon, a migraine, and then all of us started bleeding from our noses and ears.”

Bucky has no real knowledge about the human body, medical or otherwise, beyond what it takes to dismantle it. “So what was it? An aneurysm? You’re saying the kid caused this, what, telepathically?”

“Yes.” He is quiet for a moment, worrying, the feel of it distinct even from hundreds of miles away.

“There’s something else.”

He doesn’t deny it. Finally, he sighs, and manages, “The aneurysm was just the physical reaction. The three of us, Sharon, Nat, and me, were taken back to a memory that called up a specific emotive reaction. We think it reflected what the kid was feeling in the moment, which he projected or called up in us.”

“I don’t understand,” Bucky says.

More long, uneasy quiet. “He didn’t do it on purpose.”

“All right. So he wasn’t in control. That makes sense. He doesn’t have any reason to hurt you right now, you are the only people in his corner.”

Bucky could bring up a thousand other contradictive possibilities – the fact that they still don’t have a good enough grasp on the kid’s motives or origins or this situation in general, the fact that Steve tends to see the best in people to his determent, especially if he happens to be fond of them. But Bucky pointing this out won’t change the fact that Steve knows all this already. 

Steve isn’t wrestling with the kid’s intentions, but something else entirely. There’s a reason Steve’s talking to him right now, after such a long radio silence.

“It isn’t that.” 

Bucky can picture him rubbing the back of his neck the way he does when he feels uncertain, nervous. He waits, allowing Steve the space to speak.

“What he was doing would’ve killed us, all three of us, if he hadn’t stopped it. We couldn’t move or think. He sedated himself to stop it, even though he knew that was dangerous. And I know…he might’ve known he’d be all right, that it might not be as significant a moral act as I’d like it to be, but…”

“You want to know if he saved you or not,” Bucky suggests. 

“Whether he saved us from himself, I guess.”

“And you think that if he did act selflessly, then that proves you made the right choice back in Detroit,” Bucky continues. “You’re questioning your choices.”

He almost adds, but doesn’t, the accusation always so close to brimming over in these last few months of polite avoidance, ‘You always do this.’

Steve’s voice is remote, melancholy. He speaks as if he heard the accusation anyway, as if Bucky has never needed to say it. “I know. He said something before it all started to happen, about whether his guilt makes him deserve what they did to him.”

“It makes sense that you want to believe him,” Bucky says. “It would make everything simpler, if he were innocent.”

“But what if he’s not? Natasha and Sharon are right. He could be lying. And what would it say about me if that changes my course of action?”

“That you’re normal. You’re conflicted. Anyone would be Steve.”

“That isn’t true. Tony would lock him up if he were guilty.”

“Tony’s approach to justice,” Bucky says, “Is very crime and punishment. You’re better than Tony. The whole point of you is that you’re not vindictive. You’re relentlessly good.”

“You think too well of me,” Steve says softly.

Bucky let’s this rest, just for a second, in the space between them. 

Then he says, “Is it dark where you are?”

The change of subject allows a brief moment of grace before Steve replies, “Not quite. I’m watching the sun rise right now, between the trees. Is Brooklyn awake yet?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I can hear it from where I’m sitting. It misses you.”

Steve laughs, and it’s a hearty, genuine sound. Bucky tries to keep his own smile quiet and ignore the flip of his stomach. He doesn’t need anything else, he tells himself. He can live on this. He can subsist on this, at least for now.

“You said that the kid called up specific emotions, specific memories,” he says. “And you think this has a tie to why Mercury wants him dead?”

“I think so. Yeah, maybe,” Steve says, gathering himself. “I can’t really explain it. Maybe when you get here, Sharon or Nat can try. It was…paralyzing. Harrowing. I’ve never been…I don’t know. I’m still feeling the effect of it now. You know how it is after you wake up from a really bad dream, and it takes you a minute to figure it out? It’s like that.”

“What was it he wanted you to feel?”

“Like he did,” Steve answers immediately. “Alone. He…I remembered you. I remembered the train in the Alps, Buck. When I thought I’d lost you. I was just stuck in that moment, feeling what I felt then.”

Bucky shivers. He remembers that moment, too. Still dreams it, sometimes, though not as often as he used to do. A blur of gravity, and cold, and the sudden, crushing terror that it would all be over, and he didn’t have a chance to brace for it. He was dead before he knew what had happened, and then a little while later – seconds, or days, or years – he was worse than dead.

He thinks about hanging up but doesn’t.

Instead, he thinks about the week after they had arrived back in New York, newly pardoned, Steve welcomed into the open arms of Tony and the city and everyone in-between. And Bucky had hung back because what else was he supposed to do?

The tabloids got a little snarky, but for the most part Tony and all his money managed to keep his presence quiet. There had already been think pieces, essays, and interviews from psychologists and brain chemistry experts and philosophers about what his actions meant, whether he could truly be held accountable for all the horrible shit he had done while brainwashed and under duress.

People were still dead. And he had killed them. So where was the justice in that? It was too complex an issue for Tony to approach it with any real open-mindedness. His compromise had been purely utilitarian. He wanted Steve back on his side, and Bucky couldn’t blame him. It didn’t look good to have Captain America standing on the other side of the field from you.

It had taken them all a little while to sort through what would come next. They moved into this apartment, settled in, and Steve and Sam showed him all the ways the city had changed and all the ways it had stayed the same.

Bucky has been in a lot of cities since he and Steve first grew up in Brooklyn, and he knows each city has a particular sound to it. Even with the evolution of passing years, New York still sounds like itself. Like home. He slept better those first few nights, his mattress still flat on the floor, sheets lost in an unpacked box, then he had in a long time.

Steve’s adopted birthday wasn’t long after that, and Tony wanted to celebrate, throw a party, because that’s what Tony did. Steve and Sam went, and Bucky stayed behind. It was a muggy summer night, the air-conditioning unit mostly broken. 

He went around that first hour prying all the windows open to the breathless air and the sour city noise. It was fine. It was good, even. He had a drink, turned on cable news, and went to bed. 

Later, hours later, the sound of the front door opening broke Bucky out of a light doze. He lay on his back, listening to Steve drop the keys in the dish by the door, kick off his shoes. For a second, he was hurtled back in time, until he heard Steve’s phone clatter on the kitchen counter and remembered. This wasn’t like before. Steve had his own key, it wasn’t a spare, and Sam should be with him but wasn’t, and that was new, too.

It was only when he heard Steve stumble down the hall that he understood.

A light knock came on his bedroom door. “You awake?”

It cracked open before Bucky could answer, and Steve stood in the doorway, backlit by the hall light, swaying slightly.

“Are you drunk?” Bucky asked, groggy.

“I…think so. Yeah? I think so.”

“I thought you couldn’t get drunk.”

Steve hiccupped. “Technically, I can’t. But er…Tony and Thor joined forces, let’s say, to resounding success. I am…I am trashed.”

“Where’s Sam?”

“He met someone. Went home with them. Or did I leave him there? No, no…he said good-bye.” He leaned on Bucky’s doorjamb and heaved a world-weary sigh. “Tony offered me a spare room, but I said ‘no’. I said no I have to go back.”

“You could’ve stayed there, Steve. I wouldn’t’ve minded.”

He grinned, wide and guileless. “No, you would’ve worried. You’re a worrywart. Pathological worrywart.” 

Bucky pushed himself to his feet. “Let’s get you to bed, huh, pal? We’ll thank Tony together in the morning.”

“Hangover’s going to be a bitch, isn’t it?” Steve mumbled.

Bucky laughed despite himself. “I would bet money on it. How’d you feel right now?”

“Like I’m floating. Am I floating?”

“No.”

“Bummer,” he murmured. Bucky reached for his elbow and he pulled away. “What are you doing?”

“Taking you to your room and putting you to bed, you lightweight.”

“Am not a lightweight,” Steve insisted.

“My extensive experience dragging you home and pulling off your shoes begs to differ,” Bucky told him dryly. “Now c’mon, let’s go.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that.”

“Yeah, I know you didn’t. Are you gonna stand there all night or are we going to drink some water and pass out?”

Steve contemplated this. “Can I sleep here?”

“In my room? Why in hell do you want to sleep in my room?”

In the poor light through his bedroom window, Steve’s brow screwed up as he attempted to muster an answer. “Like old times. You remember?”

Couch cushions on the floor. Bucky remembered. But back then, the places they lived were drafty and damp and they had been silhouetted versions of the people they now were, all shape and shadow, not yet filled in. 

He almost said no, but he thought about how hard it would be to drag a drunk, obstinate Steve back to his own room, and gave in.

“Fine,” he said, tossing his pillow on the floor. “You sit there.”

Steve flopped down on the mattress with no protest. 

“I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”

“Yessir, Sargent Barnes,” Steve said, sloppily amused.

Bucky shook his head, went to grab Steve’s pillow and a glass of water from the kitchen.

By the time he got back, Steve had already passed out. Bucky set the glass of water on the nightstand within reach, nudged the pillow under Steve’s head, and stretched out on the floor. He didn’t go back to sleep, stuck listening to Steve’s breathing.

“Buck.” His voice came quietly, like maybe he’d been awake and thinking the entire time. “You remember Gracie?”

It took Bucky a second to follow this train of thought. “Gracie? You mean that girl I dated right before the war?”

“You remember asking me to meet her?”

“Not really,” Bucky said, even though he did remember. Steve had been awful that night, sour and pissy, and Bucky had not been able to account for it.

“You really liked her. And I knew I was being an ass, and I couldn’t figure out why, because she was a nice enough girl. You know. Smart. Spirited. Kind. I never had any sort of problem with any of the other girls you dated, and I kept trying to figure out why Gracie bothered me so much…”

“You finally figure out why? Is that why you’re telling me this?” 

“You actually cared about her,” Steve said. “You were serious about her. That’d never happened before.” He paused. “I thought you were going to marry her.”

“That would’ve been a real laugh.”

“Why?”

“Because she left me for a woman named Maxine, Steve. She was a Lesbian.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

Bucky jammed his pillow more securely under his chin. “Because I knew you’d be smug about it. You were the one that kept telling me she couldn’t possibly be as great as she seemed, always insisting she was hiding something.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago. Is there a reason we’re gossiping like it’s a slumber-party?”

“I guess not.” He lapsed into silence. “I don’t think I’m drunk anymore.”

“Good. Drink your water and go to sleep, then.”

“Do you…?” Steve started, the question wavering, hopeful, before it dropped away into the sleepy dark. “Never mind. It’s nothing. Good night, Buck.”

“Night, weirdo. Happy not birthday.”

Bucky fell asleep again, woke up again an hour or so later. He had rolled over in his sleep, closer to the mattress where Steve sprawled, passed out, one arm outflung over the edge of the mattress.

Their fingers were a hairsbreadth apart. 

Suddenly wide awake and buzzing, Bucky rolled onto his back, away from Steve, who continued to snore lightly. Laying there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, he tried to figure out if it had been a dream or something else, because he swore he remembered Steve’s fingers brushing his.

Was he asleep? Still a little drunk? Was it all in Bucky’s own head?

It didn’t really matter in the end because whatever had happened, Steve hadn’t held on.

On the other end of the line, roughly three years later, Steve says, “Are you still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here,” Bucky tells him. 

“I wanted to ask you about the kid,” he says, once again side-stepping all attempts to bring this whole mess between them into any sort of light. “You remember how I said he said he doesn’t remember the time period where those people ended up dead?”

Bucky sighs quietly to himself, rubbing at the ache that has started in his shoulder, as it always does when it gets cold or he gets irritated. “Yeah. I do. What about it?”

“I’m thinking he probably also doesn’t remember what happened to him at Mercury.”

“Those are two different sets of events,” Bucky says. “The one is totally divorced from the other. As far as we know, Mercury has no good reason for doing a wipe on him for the murders. If he presented a threat during the course of his time at Mercury, then they probably wiped him and wiped him repeatedly. At least that’d be their course of action if they’re operating out of the same playbook as big brother. But he was claiming to have no memory of the last set of murders almost as soon as he got into police custody back in ’89. Wait.”

“What is it?”

A thought has occurred to him, a thought which sends a chill straight through his body. “I think…I think I might know what went wrong. It’s too much to explain right now, and I’m not completely sure, I’d have to talk to Nat, or…or Bruce first…”

“You can’t talk to Bruce,” Steve says. “At least not unless you’re sure he won’t go to Tony.”

Bucky hears footsteps down the hall and sits up straight just as Sam’s key rattles in the lock.

“Hey, Sam’s here. I’ll have to call you back. Ask Nat about the memory man. She ran in the same circles I did, she might’ve heard of him.”

“What?” Steve sounds distracted, a note of stern attention in his voice directed elsewhere.

“I said I’ve got to call you back. Is something wrong?”

“I…I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve got to go. NATASHA!” 

He hangs up. Bucky stares down at the phone and Sam opens the door, coffee in hand. 

“Steve call?”

“We’ve got to get out there,” Bucky tells him, standing. “Right now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gay yearning is more fun to write than to live through, in my experience. Hope the angst was to your liking. 
> 
> I'll see you next week, probably not until Thursday. I've got a lot going on the home front, and beyond that, I need to do some heavy editing/adjusting on my end. Plus --- a lot of writing. I'm struggling to pin down and put into words the illusive feeling of wanting someone but not being able to tell them, which is hard, because, well. Not to be totally saccharine, but the 'not being able to tell them' sort of precludes words. A little obvious, probably, but there you go.
> 
> Anyway. When I do get back to you on Thursday, (according to my calendar, that'll be 1/14), I'll post two chapters. 
> 
> As always, thanks for sticking around, I appreciate it. After all the craziness that has been this week, relax if you can. Take a breath. Hydrate. Play with a pet. Read your favorite comfort fic, and I'll be back soon.
> 
> -Iz


	30. To Be Honest, I’m Absolutely Gutted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emmett gets a bad feeling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey y'all. Here's the Thursday chapter as promised. Italics = single quotations.
> 
> TWs necessary for this one - this chapter is a....lot, in terms of violence. I know I put graphic violence in the Archive Warnings, but this is more than I've written before. So if you don't want to encounter depictions of bodily mutilation (i.e-being gutted), I'd steer clear. Also, allusion to minor sleeping with an adult. There's a passing mention about letting one's self die, it's pretty quickly refuted, but be aware of that too.
> 
> With that said, I think we're ready to go.

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]:

I wake with a start, sitting bolt upright, my heart slamming hard against my ribs. Harry, who slept curled up next to me, meows in protest and hops to the floor. I clutch at my chest, glancing around, adrenaline singing cold through my whole body.

It takes me a handful of groggy seconds to figure out where I am. The cabin to which they’ve brought me is small and remote. Beyond the walls I can sense wilderness for miles, muffled by thick snow.

It is still and mostly quiet. The main room, where I’ve been deposited on a worn corduroy couch, is empty, a pile of extra blankets sitting on the coffee table, the two duffle bags that constitute the entirety of the others’ luggage dumped in one of the recliners. The pipes rattle with running water. 

My head hurts, the pain concrete and ugly, bubbling up beneath my now-fading panic. It rolls in waves from the spot where the dead implant is located under my skin, and it is made worse for being the first real physical hurt I’ve felt since I woke up at the lab in Detroit. 

If I had to guess, it’s the after-effect of the zapping Natasha did back at the B&B combined with the second dose of a heavy tranquilizer within seventy-two hours.

If I focus, it hurts worse. So, with a twinge that emanates from that same spot at the base of my skull, I know that Sharon is the one in the running shower, Natasha is still asleep in one of the two bedrooms, and Steve is on the roof, on a phone call.

I assume he’s talking to Sam, but his mood isn’t the same as when he was around Sam. With Sam, he was clear-cut, confident, very much the do-gooder and the soldier, all of these aspects of himself obvious and close to the surface. Now, I sense a familiar murkiness of feeling, a hesitancy, and I know instantly that the person on the other end of the line is both the best friend he told me about before and connected to the box he always carries around.

It’s the clearest I’ve ever been able to read him in this regard. And – my head pulses painfully, but I’ve got a vivid image of snowy mountains and clear, winter blue sky. 

The Alps if I had to hazard a guess.

“Weird,” I mutter, holding a hand to my aching skull. 

This revelation doesn’t matter much in the moment. It could point to a thousand possibilities, all of which I can evaluate later. The most pressing matter is twofold. 

One: I have no right to be awake right now. Last time Steve dosed me, I’d been under for almost ten hours. The second dose should’ve hit me like a freight train, and yet, judging from the caliber of the light, we’re only at about midmorning the day after the minivan incident. Five, six hours at most.

Two: Something woke me up. 

I get up, pausing to listen to Natasha’s breathing through the wall, the rattle of the pipes. Then I go over to the pair of duffle bags piled on the recliner and find the device Natasha used on me at the B&B in a secret compartment of her duffle. 

It’s almost too easy, I think, slipping it in the pocket of my sweatpants. 

It has not escaped my notice that they’ve left me alone. Again. I remember the device used at the motel, the one that incapacitated me. The memory makes me wince.

There are several explanations for this apparent negligence. We are in the middle of nowhere. If I did choose to escape right now, where would I go? Also, I dosed myself with a tranquilizer that, if the world made any sort of sense anymore, should’ve killed me. I shouldn’t be awake right now or for several more hours.

I recall what Steve said to me at the motel. That I could walk away anytime I wanted. I didn’t believe him then, and I’m not convinced now, but the lack of supervision is telling. Of what, I’m not sure.  
In the next room, Natasha, her sleep light and hyperaware, has a knife clutched under her pillow. She doesn’t hear me, doesn’t snap awake, superspy senses tingling. Maybe it’s because I am who I am now, but that doesn’t feel quite right, either.

I’m brought back to that same conclusion, seemingly unrelated. Something woke me up. 

The feeling of it is like an incessant pressure, an irresistible urge, pent tight beneath my skin, and the only way to get rid of it is to follow it to its end. The adrenaline has gone away but the fear is feral and ever-present, cold as a block of ice in my stomach, suffocating my hunger pangs. 

I make my way through the tiny cabin to the front porch. Steve’s phone call snaps more clearly into focus and I rub at my ear in an effort not to listen to it. They’re talking about me, I know. I could eavesdrop on the other end of the conversation if I wanted. That would take more effort, though, and likely cause me more pain, a possibility I’m not willing to explore at the moment. Besides, I’m more concerned with another, far more urgent issue. 

I stand in my shirtsleeves and sweatpants, both dirty and lightly blood-spattered by the events of the last few days. It is bitterly cold. From here, I can see the dense black pine trees that surround the cabin, along with the barely visible snow-covered drive that must lead back to the main road. The minivan sits neatly parked in the snow. A shed made of naked brown wood and peeling roofing tiles lies just behind it, partly obscured from view.

I curl my toes in my stolen sneakers, squinting up at the sky and watching the warmth of my breath stain the air.

Harry, who I’ve confined in the house, yowls plaintively for me. Inside, the shower shuts off. I resist the urge to massage at the ache in my head and contemplate the fact that every time I’ve woken up in the last few days, it’s been from unconsciousness, not sleep.

I contemplate a lot, actually.

I contemplate how I can’t remember anything that happened to me at Mercury. I don’t know how long I was with them, even, before they put me on ice. I guess I could try to remember, but I don’t know what good that would do. Part of me doesn’t want to remember.

I contemplate Brendan and where he might be and if he’s even alive out there. Jury’s out on whether he meant to disappear or not, and who else would look for him – or look out for him – once I was gone? After my grandma died, he was the only person who ever gave a shit about me. I always suspected that maybe his care was utilitarian. He was always so blithe, a textbook narcissist, the sort of person who kept you around because you entertained him, not because he loved you. Still. I hope he’s alive. I want him to be alive. 

I contemplate the murders, and how I can’t remember them, either. I contemplate Norman Mulligan, that spineless fuck, and how I might not be here at all if he could’ve just told the police that he let me sleep in his bed. I hope he’s dead, but with a weary exhaustion that dissolves any real anger. I wonder if he knows – or knew – that I didn’t tell the police the details, that they filled in the blanks on that secret themselves.

I contemplate Darlene, the owner of the B&B, and I contemplate Steve and Natasha and Sharon. Mostly, I contemplate why I’m out here, why I’m awake. I think I know why.  
I frown at the shed, wrapping my arms around myself, as if that’ll bring me any real warmth. 

An awareness has crept into my peripheral, an awareness that extends beyond Steve pacing up on the roof or Sharon emerging from the bathroom or Natasha stirring from her sleep. An awareness that prickles up the back of my neck and shivers in my gut, more visceral and acute than fear.

It isn’t possible. 

I hear Sharon ask from inside, “Where’d the kid go?”

“He’s fine,” Natasha yawns. “I checked. He’s out on the porch.”

“Were you watching him?”

“No. I just woke up. Steve was supposed to be out here.” 

I hear the beep as she jabs at the ancient coffee pot, hair frizzed with sleep. 

“Well, where did he go?”

Natasha doesn’t answer, but the footsteps on the roof do the job for her. I tune the following conversation out, turning my attention to the shed. It looks deserted, mostly swallowed by the encroaching forest, its lone window boarded up. The door is shut tight.

“I am not paranoid,” Sharon insists behind me.

“Whatever. Is there creamer around here?”

Glancing back, I ease the screen door open, then step out and close it gently behind me. Inside, they continue to bicker. Steve is on the opposite end of the roof. 

The surety that draws me onward is fraught, electric. Logically, there is no way. The tracker is dead. I’m in the company of superspies and practiced fugitives. No one could have followed us out all this way, least of all them.

Logic doesn’t matter much to my surety, a grim and ancient alarm honed by Mercury to a keen edge. I check the pocket of my sweatpants with a light touch.

I think I knew this would happen. I think that’s why I left the message on the mirror back at the bed and breakfast. I think it’s why I stole the device. I contemplate whether the hunter thinks they can hide from me. The bare edge of a smile tugs the corner of my mouth.

I pick my way toward the shed, sticking to the shoveled parts of the front yard and edging around the minivan parked in front of it. I stop by the passenger side door, tug it open.

They know I’m coming. They’re luring me, I think. And they wait while I find the sowing kit sweet, paisley-vested Darlene kept in the door of her car. There’s a tiny pair of scissors in it, and I click open the plastic case, tuck them in my palm. I toss the rest of the kit in the seat, leave the door gaping open. No use making untoward noise. Natasha and Sharon are still oblivious inside, snipping about hair dye and disguises now.

The minivan itself sits low to the ground and as I move around it I confirm why: the tires have all been slashed. They managed to do this without alerting anyone in the cabin and I wonder if I move in that sort of silence now, too. I wonder if I’m making them just as afraid of me as they’re making me afraid of them.

I wonder why they’ve waited until now to let me know they can do this, move at the edges of awareness, undetected. Make others afraid. Maybe they didn’t let on because then I’d know I could do it, too. Maybe it wasn’t them at all, carefully hoarding this information, but the specter standing beyond them, a shadow out of sight, the thing that did this to me, to both of us. Mercury. 

I know from the hinges that the shed’s door opens outward. I reach forward and grip the rusted knob, wait a second more just so I can savor the hard beat of my heart in my chest.

Then I fling the door open and hurl myself into the body poised on the other side. 

The hunter catches me, uses my own momentum to slam me into the workbench, knocking the air from my lungs, throwing off my center of gravity and leaving me breathless.

They’re not wearing their mask, their dark hair undone and hanging around their face. They use the full weight of their body to keep me pinned, one foot wedged against the inside of my foot to limit my range of movement and keep me off balance. 

The inside of the shed is narrow and cramped, cold and reeking of wood rot. Their face is within inches of mine, and I’m close enough that I can feel the heat pouring off of them in waves, much like the heat I felt off of Steve the first time we met, heat I know now to identify as time displacement. 

The tip of their knife digs into my stomach, a little more pressure and a neat yank and I will be gutted, entrails spilling warm onto the packed dirt and sawdust of the floor. I have the sowing scissors resting against the vein in their neck. A little more pressure, minimum blood spatter, and they will bleed out without a chance to recover this time. 

“Hi, babe,” I say, grinning. “Miss me?”

The hunter sneers, increasing the pressure of the knife, their weight keeping me pinned. “Quite an attitude for someone with a knife in his gut.”

“Cold war, sweetheart,” I reply, pressing the point of the scissors a little harder into their skin. “That’s your carotid. What an embarrassing way to go out, huh? A pair of sowing scissors in an abandoned shed?”

“For someone who claims to be innocent, you sure do have an impressive knowledge of anatomy,” the hunter replies, keeping their voice low.

“What can I say, I spent most of my time in the public library,” I say breezily. “Now what happens next? See, I’m thinking I scream--”

They use their weight to press the air from my lungs and the knife further into my gut, enough that I feel a hot trickle of blood down my stomach.

“Ah,” I say breathlessly, our faces closer now, the tiny, sharp scissors digging into the pulse of their artery. “Careful.”

“You think this is a game.”

I press my knee into the inside of their thigh. “Isn’t it?”

Their dark eyes glint. “I am here to kill you.”

“All right. Then kill me.” I pause, let the dare linger. They don’t move. I’ve still got the scissors ready to puncture their carotid. “I’d hurry it up if I were you. They’ll notice I’m gone soon.”  
They smile, more a flicker of facial muscles than a genuine expression. “No, they won’t.”

“And you think once you kill me you can…what? Neutralize them? Leave my body here for them to find?”

“Something like that.” Their brows quirk with neutral curiosity. “What, did you think that after failing to get away with everything else you’d somehow get away from this? That you’d be able to exercise agency ‘now’ after eighteen years of shitty luck? You’re a victim, Emmett. That’s all you’ll ever be.”

I feel the blade resting against my belly and I laugh. “Is that so? You know me that well?”

“You’re transparent,” they tell me, amused. “Literally, figuratively.”

“And you think you’re not?” I say, something sharper than adrenaline thrumming in my head. “You know my name. You read my files. So what? You’re not special. You don’t know shit about me. And I don’t need to know your past or your name to know you.” I press closer and the knife cuts deeper, releasing a fresh well of blood. They remain motionless, looking straight back at me, gaze weighty and clear. “You’re reading the cue card Mercury has imprinted on the inside of your skull? Good for you. You’re not a person, you’re no more sentient than this knife. What they made you into isn’t armor. It doesn’t even belong to you. And what you are beneath that is…” I pause for effect, and then enunciate in a low, teasing voice, “…a tedious, boring virgin. Honestly, I get why you’re the one they let out to play. Never going to disobey Mommy, are you? Always the good little soldier.”

Their lip curls into a sneer. “You’re so predictable. All talk.”

“Tell yourself that,” I say. “If it makes you feel better.”

I alter my grasp on the sowing scissors, which are tiny and unwieldly in my grasp in the first place, a movement so small that only they could pick up on it. If I meant it, the killing blow would be fast, unalterable. They’d have the time and strength to kill me before the blood loss knocked them out, but I don’t mean to kill them. And it doesn’t matter anyway.

They knock my hand away midmotion and the knife pierces my gut, an inch or so below my belly button. I grunt, not so much pain or surprise as discomfort. Their mouth is set in a grim, resigned line.  
They yank the knife up now, in an effort not to pierce any of the internal organs, beginning the process of gutting me. If I were like anyone else, the pain would consume the entirety of my brain, my body, all my focus on what is happening to me, the shock of mutilation.

But the only thing that hurts is the ache in my head, and I don’t care so much about the gutting as I do about the arrogance of this person, who thinks they’re better than me. The fact that they can think this, that they could ever think this, is laughable.

My whole life has been spent out-maneuvering people who think that they’re cleverer than me, or stronger than me, or more skilled than me, or more experienced than me.  
Wrong, every time. Even when I’m powerless, I know better, and I use it.

They have a hold on the back of my head with their other hand. My blood slippery and hot splatters the floor and soaks into the sawdust. Their hands are red with it. It reminds me of that afternoon in Bedford a little bit. The light even falls through the slats in the window the same way.

It occurs to me that I could just let it all be over. I’m probably dead no matter what. But spite and something darker propels me forward. The look on their face is cold, immovable, and they don’t get to look at me that way, like I’m nothing. 

The device is in my pocket. My fingers wrap around it. 

There’s a button on the side, the button Natasha pressed when she disabled the implant. With one hand I pull the hunter to me, with as much force as I can muster, enough that they have to put their focus onto the knife and not letting it sink too deep, not yet.

With my other hand, I move faster than they can react, pressing the device against the base of their skull beneath the silky fall of their hair. I mean it this time. Their eyes widen a millisecond before I press the button, and they yank themselves from my grasp, but it’s too late.

“Fooled you,” I gasp, staggering a little, still achy and lightheaded, my own blood spilling through my fingers as I hold myself together. 

I’m half afraid the look on their face will turn me to ash, but their lovely dark eyes roll back in their head and they drop to their knees and then onto their hands before collapsing fully to the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's up! As always, thanks for sticking with me, I appreciate it.
> 
> I know I promised two chapters because I didn't update on Tuesday. Never fear, the second chapter is incoming, but it might be a little bit later today. I've got a phone interview and some errands to run so I'll be back in a few hours.
> 
> See y'all then.
> 
> Iz


	31. Surviving Is A Losing Game

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Emmett asks the big questions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so it's literally a couple minutes before midnight as I'm typing this, which means that I am going to keep my promise of getting you two chapters today! I'm too braindead to do much thinking. 
> 
> No end notes either this week. It's all the usual. I'll get you a couple chapters next week, probably also Thursday. Thanks for sticking around and I'll see you then.
> 
> Also, please excuse any blatant typos. As I said, my brain isn't really functioning. I'll go in and fix stuff later. Bye!
> 
> -Iz

[Emmett Faust (OC) POV]

I only have a few seconds.

The incision they made is only half as long as they needed it to be, but it’s deep enough that the bleeding is intense and will become a bigger problem in a matter of minutes. 

I do my best to apply pressure, staggering over the hunter’s unconscious body and out the shed door, into the bright sunlight and the snow. Steve stands at the edge of the roof, looking down at me. I look up at him and smile. Blood drips from between my fingers, bright red. I suppose it’s warm but that doesn’t really mean much. 

“Hi Steve,” I call. “Nice morning.”

“NATASHA,” he yells, and vaults off the roof, landing in the snow. The cabin door bangs open and Natasha and Sharon are on the porch, Steve already halfway to me.

I use the minivan as a prop, lightheaded now.

Steve has hold of me, leading me back to the house. I don’t remember him getting to me, but his footprints are in the snow and he is very tall and very warm, blocking out the winter sun and cold.  
Natasha and Sharon have disappeared behind me, into the shed.

“You shouldn’t be awake,” Steve says, using one arm to keep me upright and the other to apply double pressure on the wound, hand layered over mine.

“It isn’t fatal,” I say through gritted teeth. “They didn’t…hit anything. It’s just blood.”

“Good attitude. You’re going to be fine,” Steve tells me. 

“I let them do it. To catch them off guard. And it worked. Pretty smart, right?”

He purposefully doesn’t react to this. “All right let me see,” he says, lowering me on the front steps. 

“If I let go, I’m going to spill my guts into the snow,” I say.

Natasha emerges from the shed, the hunter slung over her shoulders, bound and gagged, Sharon just behind her. She dumps them at the foot of the porch steps, and they hit the snow-packed ground with a warm-bodied thud.

“You little thief,” she says to me. “You disabled their tracking device.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Sharon,” Steve interrupts. “Help me out with this.”

Sharon steps forward, evaluating the blood and the intricacy of the wound she can see. After a second, lips pursed, she says, “I’ll get the kit,” and steps around us, disappearing into the house.

“Jesus, kid,” Natasha says, frowning down at the trussed-up hunter. “What did you do?”

Her voice holds less suspicion than wariness, a sort of hyperalert fatigue. She looks from the hunter to me, slumped against Steve, blood soaking through my sweatshirt.

“Your job,” I say breathlessly.

“Don’t talk,” Steve instructs.

“Screw you,” I manage, shifting under his grip. I wince, not from pain but from the uncomfortable sensation of my intestines pushing against my own palm, which is the only thing keeping them in my body.

Sharon appears, med-kit in hand. “I can do a little, but this looks severe. We might have to go to the…”

“No hospitals,” I say sharply.

Natasha regards me, arms crossed. “He’s right. Isn’t there anyone we know who could help us out and keep this under the radar?”

“Besides me?” Sharon scoffs, kneeling on the steps beside Steve and me, “Out here? No, not really. And besides, this isn’t about skill. It’s about resources. I just don’t have what I need for this sort of thing, and neither would anyone else.”

“Good point. What do we do?” Steve asks. “Is there even a hospital within a hundred miles of here?”

Sharon unzips the kit, rummaging. “You mean could we get anywhere in time? Maybe. Doubtful. I can patch him up though, and that should hold in time to get us to Claremont county, which is about an hour away.”

I listen to them talk over my head before I take it upon myself to interrupt.

“Hey, if anyone’s interested, that’s all grossly unnecessary.”

Sharon has taken out antiseptic in a brown bottle, her pale brows raised. “Excuse me?”

“You heard what I said. I don’t need all that shit. Look.” I push myself up a little bit, forcing Steve to move with me. “Steve, you remember back at the motel when I got shot?”

He answers impatiently. “Yeah, I recall. Emmett…”

“You can look. The wound is gone.” 

They all exchange freaked out, adult glances. 

“Go ahead, look,” I insist. “I heal at an accelerated rate. Now you know. All you’ve got to do to keep me in one piece is stitch me up, and my enhanced immune system will take care of the rest. All right? You don’t need to take me to the hospital. You’re welcome. Again.”

Sharon checks the place I indicated, and Steve confirms that less than a day before, a bullet graze had very much been in evidence.

“This is a little more severe than a bullet graze,” Sharon says skeptically.

“If he says so, I believe him,” Natasha intones, skittish. She glances around as if Mercury lackeys will suddenly materialize from the forest. “He’s the one who’s been disemboweled."

"Not disemboweled, gutted," I correct. “Disemboweled is a sideways cut higher up on the stomach, meant to get your insides, outside. It’s a torture technique mostly. You’re supposed to be alive for it. Gutting is what you do to a deer after you shoot it. It’s a vertical cut, like so, and you’re supposed to reach in and pull the insides out. Much more practical. And they didn’t gut me. They only half-finished the job.”

“Freak,” Natasha says into the dumbfounded silence, sounding almost impressed.

“I’ll stitch him up then, I guess, and leave it at that,” Sharon says after another beat of quiet. She gestures at Steve to let her see the wound, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. “For your sake, you better be sure.”

“I am.”

“They didn’t puncture any organs, which is good,” she continues, nudging Steve and my hands aside, her movements quick and efficient, the thin press of her lips clinical, “But they did cut through the muscle. That makes all of this a little more complicated. I can suture it, which should prevent a great deal of scar formation.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say. 

She moves to numb the area. “I’ll be honest, this will probably hurt like a bitch.”

“Don’t bother with that,” I say. “It won’t hurt.”

She stops, and the freaked-out mix of distaste and fear flashes across her face, just like it did at the bed and breakfast. Discarding the numbing agent, I sense her working to push the feeling aside, avoiding my eyes. “All right then.”

“Hurry,” Natasha says, still scanning the forest. “Mercury will have tracked wonderkid here and will know their tracker’s been disabled. We don’t have much time.”

“This is not exactly a process you rush,” Sharon says stiffly.

The incision the hunter made is simple and clean, though deep, and it doesn’t take much for her to stitch it up. I’ve lost a lot of blood by this point, and I feel both dizzy and fragile, acutely aware of the black thread sewn through my skin, holding me together. 

I’m a little annoyed I didn’t stab them, all of this considered.

When she finishes, she moves away, and I push off of Steve, propping my elbows on the top porch step behind me, resisting the urge to close my eyes and take a breath.

“They slashed the tires,” I say.

The three of them turn to look at the minivan. Natasha curses.

“That’s not…” she starts. “We should’ve noticed that. Actually, there’s no way we could’ve missed it when it happened or just now.”

“It’s a Brave New World,” I say dryly. “Guess you couldn’t have dragged me to the hospital even if you wanted to.”

Steve regards the hobbled minivan, passenger door still hanging open, his expression inscrutable. “Well, what now?”

“We could all an Uber,” Sharon suggests caustically, pulling off her bloody gloves.

No one finds this funny.

“Our new friend is going to wake up soon,” Natasha says at last. “We need to know what we’re going to do with them. How long are we reckoning it’ll take Mercury to get to us out here?”

She looks between Steve and Sharon, but I answer. “They came alone. Even with Mercury tracking them, it’ll take a minute for them to catch on to the situation and respond.”

“You’re saying they went rogue?” Sharon asks.

“Don’t ask me, you’re the spies,” I say, idly picking at the front of my sweatshirt, the blood-soaked cotton tacky and cool to the touch. I glance up when no one says anything. “What? It makes sense, doesn’t it? The Hunter shows up, two goons in tow, at the motel, and fails. Twelve more guys show up at the bed and breakfast, ‘they’ fail, and leave an even bigger scene. Now, here, the Hunter shows up again, this time by themselves. How does that read to y’all?”

Natasha sighs, rubbing at the headache developing between her eyebrows. “It reads like they didn’t succeed in killing you the first time, and they wanted to finish the job, no matter what Mercury itself had to say about it.”

“This isn’t good,” Sharon adds, redundantly. “This is really, very not good.”

Steve, who has been quiet this whole time, stands up abruptly. We all look to him.

“We need to leave. Now. Sharon?”

Sharon tucks the soiled latex gloves in a baggy, zips it up carefully. A light winter breeze stirs her hair. “I can get us a car, but it’ll leave a trail.”

“We can worry about that later. How fast?”

Her brow screws up as she thinks. “An hour?”

“Any possibility of getting it done quicker?”

“Jesus, Steve. I don’t know. Half an hour, maybe, at the minimum.”

“Good enough. Nat, can you get a picture of our new friend to Bucky and update him on our location?”

She pulls out her phone. “Sure. Where are you thinking?”

“Any ideas?”

“I know a place,” she says. “No problem. Bucky and Sam are coming then?”

“All hands on-deck,” Steve says, almost cheerily. He looks down at his hands, red with my blood, and holds them a little way from his body, though that doesn’t mean much. His jeans and his plaid button-down are stained, too, to varying degrees.

“I need to go wash up and change. You too, sport.”

“Don’t call me sport,” I say as he reaches down and lifts me up by the elbow. “Hey, wait.”

“What is it?”

I shake him off and hop off at the last step, holding my arm gingerly over Sharon’s patchwork, and take the couple steps over to the Hunter, who lays prone on their side in the snow. Their heartbeat has picked up incrementally, their brain activity increasing as their nervous system reboots.

Tipping my head, I watch as they twitch and roll over onto their back, groan muffled by Natasha’s makeshift dish-towel gag. I wait until their eyes flutter open, dazed at first, gaze darting with incomprehension over the forest and the cabin and Sharon and Steve before it snags on me. That’s when the focus snaps into place, those pretty eyes widening, the light in them furious and livid. 

They yank at the restraints, to no avail. 

“Careful,” I say, grinning down at them. “You might hurt yourself.”

“Emmett…” Steve says in a warning tone.

“Fuck off, Steve. They didn’t try and gut you.” 

They glare up at me, chest heaving, angry and helpless. A thrill lights up in my chest, visceral as the fear they made me feel, warm and sweet as relief. I wedge the toe of my sneaker under their chin, tip their face up to me. 

“This is cute, isn’t it?” I say, casual. “Swapping places, I mean. Nice change of pace. That reminds me.” I press my foot down on their larynx until they start to wheeze. “How does it feel, victimhood? Shitty, right? I’d be a little more careful with your words next time you decide to run your mouth.”

“Emmett.” Steve’s voice is more insistent this time.

“Fine, fine.” I remove my foot and make as if to turn away. “Oh, I forgot.”

Before Steve can move to stop me, I bring my foot down on their face, the cartilage of their nose cracking under my heel. They jerk backward, away from me, blood pouring down their chin, but don’t make a sound behind the gag. I watch as they flip on their side to keep the blood from emptying down their throat, heels scrabbling at the snow, struggling to breathe now with both airways inhibited. 

“Sorry,” I say, not sorry.

Steve doesn’t speak this time, grabbing me by the upper arm and yanking me away, his hold rough and almost bruising. I don’t resist. He pulls me inside.

I feel the Hunter’s eyes on my back as I go, hear them panting, the look on their face baleful. Natasha, still standing just behind them, watches too, her expression far less legible. 

“You can’t just do that,” Steve tells me, propelling me through the front door where Harry greets me, winding himself through my legs.

“Did I fail your little test?” I ask. “Saving all of your pathetic asses wasn’t enough? Twice, actually. I saved you all twice.”

He lets me go as if holding onto me hurts and doesn’t reply.

“I’m not a good person Steve. I’m not going to magically transform into a good person just because it would be easier for you,” I say. “You’re the one who decided to take me on. I had nothing to do with that.”

“If you want our help, it might be wise to at least fake decency,” Steve says, moving past me down the hall. 

I stay in the entryway, leaning against the sink. His shoulders fill the narrow hallway. He has to duck his head to keep it from hitting the ceiling. Harry meows and butts his head against my ankle.

“Why should I fake decency? None of your friends do.”

He tugs open the linen closet. “That’s different.”

“No, it’s not, and you know it. What is it? Killing those people back in Bedford crosses a line for you? You’ve killed people, Natasha’s killed people. I’d wager even Sharon’s got a higher body count than I do.” He cuts a glance at me, and I add, “Allegedly. If I did do it, what makes me so different than all of you?”

“It’s different,” Steve says, “It just is. If you don’t understand that…”

I’ve struck a nerve. “I don’t think it’s me who doesn’t understand. In fact, I think I understand perfectly. Better than you do, at least. Right?”

He pulls out a ragged lavender towel, tosses it at me. “Let me see if I can scrounge you up a new pair of clothes.”

I catch the towel, bunch it up in my hands. “Yeah, see if you can find anything in scrawny mutant serial killer, would you?” 

He retreats into the living room, and I call after him, “This conversation isn’t over, Steve. You’re going to have to find a way to reckon with me before this is finished.”

The only response is a slammed bedroom door, and I’m left alone. The Hunter’s blood flecks my shoe, and my own blood has ruined the sweatshirt and pants. Harry hums like a miniature motor at my feet. I stare after Steve, reflecting.

Pushing other people’s buttons is a skill I honed long before Mercury got to me. It’s the opposite of a survival instinct, a tactic to force people to show me their hand. Steve still hasn’t shown me his, not all of it at least.

I can’t figure out what it is that really bothered him just now – whether it was me getting hurt or me hurting the Hunter or something else. I do know that Steve might not have been close enough to keep me from breaking the Hunter’s nose, but Natasha could have stopped me if she wanted. She didn’t though. She let me do it.

Huh.

These people baffle me. I can read them but being able to read them doesn’t mean I understand them, any of them, anymore than I understand myself. 

I’ve long since given up the belief that the world owes it to me to make sense. It doesn’t. Awful things happen all the time. Awful things happen to me, whether or not I deserve it. People don’t owe it to the world or anyone else to make sense, either. That’s true of me, and it’s true of these three people who have for some reason chosen to throw in their lot with me, despite all the other shit mucking up the waters. 

Still. People leave me. It’s just what they do, on purpose or not. They die, or they abandon me, or they give up on me for their own reasons or because I make them or for no reason at all. I’m certain that these people will leave me too, even Steve, stubbornly loyal as he is. It’s a matter of time, is all. It’s a matter of whether they do it on their own, or whether I push them to do it.

It’s hard to brace myself for it, even after everything, to cast my mind forward to that inevitable point in the future where I’ll have to deal with all of this by myself once more. Alone. 

I can’t think about the fact that I’d be dead right now if it were just me, bled out in the snow. I draw my arm tighter around my middle, recalling the feel of the Hunter’s blade as it slid neatly up through skin and fat and muscle. That’s the way it’s always been, I reason. Dead or alive, it’ll be me in the end either way.


	32. Treating Inside Wounds with Drinking Alcohol

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Wanda plays the middleman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, and we're back y'all. You know the drill. Also, New POV alert! We're hearing from our resident depressed witch today. 
> 
> There's allusions to alcohol dependency so be forewarned.
> 
> See you in a bit.

[Wanda Maximoff POV]

She meets him in a bar in Brooklyn, hood pulled up over a knit cap, face mask and sunglasses firmly in place. Her hair, dyed a distinct bright pink at the moment, is tied back and stuffed down her collar, out of sight.

The bar is closed, permanently closed, as it is with so many businesses right now. The interior is dim and dusty, a damp basement chill lingering with the smell of wood polish and spilled beer.

She has taken a stool down from the counter, placed herself at the bar with a glass and a bottle of whiskey, filched from the shelf. The bottle is still dusty, smeared where she’s gripped the neck. The glass she wiped down with a rag found tucked under the register. Her mask she has pulled temporarily under her chin.

She’s poured herself a whiskey, neat, twice over, despite it being only three in the afternoon.

It’s one of those days. 

Most days are one of those days, the kind of days when she gets sad and morose and macabre. Red energy sparks and fizzes around her fingers, a symptom and a warning sign. It happens when she gets buzzed. Her carefully constructed dams all start to erode, and her power pushes against them, a relentless tide, and she’s the little boy plugging a leaky hole with her hand, like that’ll stop anything or make any of this better.

She misses her brother. All the time, she misses him, but there are moments and days when the missing him evolves from a melancholy ache into a weepy black hole. Now is such a moment, such a day. They don’t come fewer or far between like people said they would. Wanda doesn’t know why she believed them when they said that. She knows better these days than to believe in anything.

The door to the back swings open, disrupting her train of thought, and Bruce enters, lowering his hood and looking around. He’s dressed like he’s been on a run, all sweat suit and pit stains, headphones looped around his neck. He keeps his mask up as he approaches.

“Hey, Brucey,” she says, raising her glass as if to toast him. “Pull up a chair.”

“Wanda,” he says, gaze lighting on her, and then the half-drunk whiskey. “Isn’t it a little early for that?”

“What is that saying you Americans like? It’s five o’clock somewhere?”

“Hm. I’m not sure if that’s American in origin,” Bruce says, ever exact, coming around the bar and pulling down another stool. 

She waits until he has seated himself, taking a sip. “I did the training, you know, on how to be a bartender. Mixology, I think. It was fun.” Another sip. “Pointless, but fun. May as well put the skill to use, right? I should have learned French. Or how to play chess.”

He is tactful enough to keep the concern from his face. “Why am I here, Wanda?”

“You mean why have I asked you to come here with such secrecy?”

“Yeah, sure. I’m guessing Tony has no idea where we are right now, does he?”

“We live in a surveillance state,” Wanda says idly, swirling the remaining whiskey in her glass. She studies the way the amber liquid catches the ambient light. “Tony has some idea where we are, I’m sure, but the point is he won’t catch us until it’s too late.”

“Until it’s too late?” Bruce asks, apparently serene. Sparks fizz around her knuckles and his brows flicker, serenity shattered. “What is this about?”

The door to the back opens again, and Bucky steps through. Bruce straightens in his seat, clutching at the counter with white knuckles. Even before Bucky pulls down his hood, spare pieces of hair escaped from his ponytail, Bruce knows it’s him.

“Heya, Bruce,” he says.

“This is a bad idea,” Bruce says immediately, voice strained.

“You’ve been brought here under false pretenses,” Bucky says, shrugging. “That’s a pretty solid defense if you ask me. Hi, Wanda.”

“Bucky,” she says. “Nice to see you. You look like shit.”

“Cute,” he replies, unfazed. “Will you pour me one of those?”

“Grab your own glass.”

He does so, snagging one from behind the counter and coming around, taking a stool down on Wanda’s other side.

“We’re all in trouble when Tony finds out about this,” Bruce says nervously, voice lowered as if Tony can hear them. He can’t. Wanda checked this place out ahead of time. No bugs, and any listening devices brought in will be disrupted by safeguards put up by other New York ne’er-do-wells for other nefarious purposes.

She’s good at her job.

“What is Tony, your mommy?” Bucky asks as Wanda pours a generous amount of whiskey into his dusty glass. “You act like he has the right to monitor you. He put a nanny-cam in your room? Take the lock off your door? Hey, a little more than that, you miser.”

This last part he directs at Wanda, who pours another finger of whiskey in his glass and then adds one to hers for good measure. They clink glasses as Bruce watches, edgy.

“Relax, Bruce,” Wanda directs. “This isn’t good for your nerves.”

“My nerves are fine,” he snaps, fingers twisted in his lap. 

“Sure. Whiskey would help.”

“I’m not drinking when it’s still light outside,” Bruce says sanctimoniously. “Now would one of you please tell me why I’ve been brought here so we can get this over with.”

Wanda exchanges a glance with Bucky, who shrugs.

“Fine, fine,” he says. “You ever heard of the Memory Man?”

Bruce’s frown deepens. “Who?”

“He’s a conspiracy theory, a ghost, kind of like I was, but much more locally based. Never left North America, according to most accounts. The same weird details crop up in police reports from time to time, scattered across the country, and none of it was ever consolidated until departments finally started sharing information. Well, more than they did before.” He taps his glass against the counter, looking at Bruce. “So, you heard of him?”

“I’m not familiar.”

“Neither am I, but you know that already,” Wanda says.

“What is he able to do, according to these reports?” Bruce asks, resigned to playing along.

“Erase people’s memories,” Bucky says, tugging down his mask so he can drink his whiskey. “Usually only an hour or two, enough so that they’re stripped of any alibi they might’ve had.”

“Alibis for what?”

“What do you think?” Bucky asks darkly. “All sorts of shit. It started with less serious stuff, drunk and disorderly charges, minor car wrecks, vandalism. It escalated from there. Parents leaving their kids places. Assault. Then murders, lots of them.”

“God,” Wanda shudders. “How awful.”

“And this is all supposedly the same guy?” Bruce asks. “No offense, but that happens all the time, guilty people pretending they don’t remember what happened. Doesn’t mean there’s anything behind it.” He pauses, and rubs at the bridge of his nose, eyes squeezed shut. “From the look on your face, I’m guessing there’s more to the story.”

“Good guess,” Bucky says. “The sort of excuse you’re talking about usually collapses the moment it gets tested. And what sort of person would say, ‘I don’t remember’ when a better plea is ‘I didn’t do it’? Then there’s the matter of DNA collected from most of the scenes all belonging to one person, witnesses saying they only saw the person accused of the crime but security tapes catching another man, a ‘ghost’, quote unquote, method being almost exactly the same, etcetera, etcetera.” He ticks this list off on his fingers and then pauses, giving an exasperated shake of his head. “Hey, wait. You know what. This’ll be easier.”

He reaches into his coat and pulls out a manila envelope, sealed shut. Bruce eyes it like it’s a dead thing as Bucky pushes it over the counter to him.

“Oh that reminds me,” Wanda says, digging into her own coat. She hands Bucky a second envelope of about the same girth. “Here’s what you asked for. It wasn’t easy, but I’m ninety-nine percent certain Tony isn’t any wiser about the system breach.”

“Thanks, kid. Speaking of, make sure Tony doesn’t see it,” Bucky says this last part to Bruce, tapping two fingers against the envelope before nudging it the last inch toward him. “You can stuff it under your mattress or something, with your skin mags.”

“People don’t hide porn under their mattresses anymore,” Bruce says, not touching the envelope. “They keep it in a secret file on their computer.”

“Whatever,” Bucky says, sitting back. “I just need you to take a look at that and get back to me. I want to know, if there was a guy out there who could take a person’s memory, what would it do to the person’s brain whose memory he took? That make sense?”

“Do something to a person’s brain like what?” Wanda interjects, curiosity piqued.

“Like maybe screw it up enough that it interacts with other treatments in a way that has unexpected side-effects,” Bucky says.

Bruce still doesn’t touch the envelope, frown carved into his face. “Do you want me to look at a specific subject?”

“Not right now,” Bucky says lightly, “Maybe later.”

“You might want to be upfront with me. I think that’d be a good idea, considering what you’re asking,” Bruce says, turning to face him. “I know Steve is up to something. Natasha too. Does this have to do with that at all?”

“You mean the shit going down with Mercury?” Wanda suggests. “The lab that exploded?”

“Yeah, that,” Bruce says, looking at Bucky, who takes a swallow of whiskey and looks placidly back.

“I’d have to have assurance that this isn’t going to make it’s way back to Tony.”

“You think I’m a snitch?” Bruce asks, a genial edge to his voice making it so Wanda can’t quite tell if he’s amused or offended.

“Are you? You seem pretty tangled up in Tony’s apron strings if you ask me.”

Bruce shakes his head and pushes back his stool, a quiet smile touching his lips. 

“I don’t need to put up with this. After everything we’ve been through, Steve doesn’t trust me?”

“You did pick a side after you got back, didn’t you? ‘Tony’s’ side,” Bucky says pointedly. “Not all of us have the luxury of jetting out into space to get away from our problems. Some of us have had to deal with those problems, right here in real time, and that has consequences you never had to face.”

“It sounds like you’re calling me a coward.”

“If I wanted to call you a coward,” Bucky says, “I would call you a coward.”

“Boys, boys,” Wanda interjects, “We’re all fucked up in our own way. No need to get into a pissing contest over it.”

“Are you going to help me, or not?”

Bruce sighs. “I get this feeling that you all think of me as a doormat.”

“A doormat? No, Brucey. If anything, you’re a washrag, helping clean up other people’s messes,” Wanda says.

“That’s not helpful, Wanda,” Bruce says, exhaustion seeping from every pore. He pulls the envelope toward himself. 

“Helpful isn’t in my job description.”

“You’ll look into it, then?” Bucky asks.

“I will. Though there’s no guarantee Tony won’t catch wind of it. I’ll be working right under his nose,” Bruce says.

“You’re smart, I’m sure you’ll manage,” Bucky says, winking. He stands up. “You can interface with Wanda if you come up with something. She’ll get in touch with us, yeah?”

Wanda nods. “Fine.”

He and Sam will be skipping town, but Bruce doesn’t know this, and he doesn’t need to know. When Tony finds out they’re gone, and she helped, he’ll be furious with her. Wanda suspects that this will be very funny.

“I’ll go first,” Bucky says, tugging his hood back up. He downs the rest of his drink and tugs his mask back over his nose. “Follow at your leisure.”

Wanda and Bruce watch him saunter out.

“Do you know what this is about?” Bruce asks as the door swings shut.

“Not an inkling,” Wanda says sourly. “They’re too worried I’m under Tony’s thumb to read me in completely. Which, to be fair, I am.”

He glances at her with vague alarm.

“I’m not a traitor to the cause, don’t worry,” Wanda says. “I’m just under house arrest in a ridiculous facility run by a megalomaniac. And I’ve been left there.”

“It’s the best place for you,” Bruce starts, almost gently, as if trying to soothe a feral cat. Wanda is not amused.

“Yes, and who gets to decide what’s best for me? Me? Or men who have no idea what it’s like to be me?” she asks. “For once I’d like to have the freedom to make my own choices. Sounds reasonable, yeah?”

She’s angry now, not sure how she made the switch from misery, not even sure the anger and the misery are different things.

“It’s not a very good house arrest if you can get out of it as easy as this,” Bruce says, in a way that is supposed to be comforting. 

“I’m already on your side, Bruce. Or their side. Whatever. Point is, I’m helping you. You don’t need to convince me of anything,” Wanda says. She finishes off her whiskey and shoves the bottle in her coat.  
“I’m going home, or what passes for home these days. What did Bucky say? Follow at your leisure.”

Without waiting for Bruce’s response or even a goodbye, she sweeps out the door in a cascade of red sparks, leaving the smell of burnt ozone behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and that's all folks.
> 
> I know the Vision bit digresses from canon as I've committed myself to it, but such is life. Also, I know I said I'd post two chapters today, and I'm going to have to not do that. I'm moving across the country next week and haven't started packing, so. I've got to get on that.
> 
> Anyway, I may be posting on Tuesday rather than Thursday next week (cuz, y'know, moving on Friday). If I end up being too busy and you don't hear from me, don't worry, I should be back by 2/2 (Groundhog Day!! v exciting) or 2/4.
> 
> As always, thanks for sticking around, I appreciate it.
> 
> See you when I see you.
> 
> -Iz


End file.
